Page 6 of The Salt King

He frowned into it, hating it.

Seeing differently meant thinking differently, and if a place could change your eyes, then it would change your mind soon after.

Not much further on, drawn straight across the path, there was a clear line. On Avelyn’s side, there was salt glittering in the gravel, and thick mud. On the other side, as if it were just beyond the invisible wall of a snow globe, there was a blizzard.

The snow was falling in incredible loops, the flakes magnificent and inches thick on the ground. Avelyn nearly laughed, because he had forgotten just how extreme the weird microclimates here could be. The horse snorted as snow fell onto her nose, but she was used to it and plodded on without any pause, leaving heavy shoe prints behind. Despite everything, Avelyn cheered up. He had a theory that your reaction to snow was a perfect measure of your mental health. If you looked outside and saw snow and thought, Yay, snowman time! then you were all right. If you thought, Ugh, what a pain in the arse, then probably you needed some antidepressants. The Jesuit motto was that God was in all things, and although Avelyn struggled with that, he was solid about God being in the snow.

Snow at Yule, whispered Hreodwater Avelyn from by his fire in the rubble, is not our snow.

“Shut up,” Avelyn said aloud.

To either side of the road was nothing but the reed-waving fen. Ahead, as always once you were close, fog. Then salt water washed across the road, the salt light in it just enough for him to see the silhouettes of the eels. No boat waited, so he took out the matches he’d only just remembered to bring, slipped down from the horse, and climbed the ladder up to the stone beacon. He balanced on the second-to-last rung to hunch over the kindling.

Expecting that it would be a little while, he settled down on the wharf with his flask of coffee and apple number three, and handed apple number four to the horse. They weren’t good apples, but for a long time now, he hadn’t been able to taste much. He had noticed it when he first arrived in Rome and thought he’d just got some kind of quiet cold, but it had never gone away.

The horse made an interrogatory sound at him and looked at the ground, which was moving.

He stood up fast, because it wasn’t the ground moving. It was rats. Hundreds of rats: they were swimming out of the water, scrambling ashore, and darting away onto the fen as though there was a fire behind them. There was nothing behind them, though. Only a flare of salt light in the fog, brighter than he’d ever seen it, from the minehead.

The ferryman had been the same person since Avelyn could remember. She was called Redspear—Avelyn had never been sure if that was a first or last name—and when she wasn’t steering the ferry, she was a farmer, which was why there were always seven or eight interested pigs aboard. Redspear believed in making sure they got in a good evening constitutional. As Avelyn tied the horse’s bridle to the rail, they all came to say hello. For her part, the horse seemed not to mind the ferry, although that might have been because she was distracted by a piglet, who had sat down next to her, clearly trying to work out what sort of pig she was.

“That’s never Avelyn Brocken come home again,” Redspear said suddenly in Hreod.

Avelyn hadn’t heard a word of Hreod since he’d left. It was a language from another life. “It is, grandmother.”

It was coming back as easily as slipping down a muddy hill.

Redspear broke into a slow grin. “I thought the King would wake sooner.”

She did not mean the King of England.

“Same,” Avelyn admitted, watching the water and trying desperately to broadcast preoccupation so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore.

The water was so salty that nothing grew in it. It was quartz-clear all the way down. That was about twenty feet at this time of year. Down there were the offerings of millennia sinking into the silt. By the motes of salt light dissolved into the water, he could see it all glinting. Coins, knives, sometimes armour—and once, a crown.

“What’s it like in the Outside?” Redspear asked.

Avelyn thought about it, not with his normal thinking, which Redspear would find at best irrelevant and at worst insane, but his Hreod thinking. He had hoped it was dead and cremated long ago, but no: there it was, waking with the deepening cold and the brightening salt, just like his eyes. “There’s nothing there,” he said at last.

Redspear looked satisfied. “Thought so.”

And there was Hreodwater. At first, it was a collection of sharp, tall angles in the fog: a rock that stood in the Flood, even though there was never rocky ground in the fens. It was because it wasn’t real rock. It was halite, hard as granite, never dissolving despite the water and the vaporous air. The houses were high and narrow, following the rock up right to the top, their lights so much dimmer than anything in the Outside. They glittered in the salt-rimed thatch and above the uneven doors, along the slim flights of steps that led up and up, and around the spiral of the single road.

He had a terrible swell of homecoming.

If, after years wandering, Eve’s lodestone had lost its magnetism and the stars had tricked her back the way she had come, and she found herself standing outside the gate of Eden, the masonry tumbled by bad weather so she could see inside to the spices and the flowers, up to the great tree on its hill where the snake had said, It’s better to know than not know: he thought maybe he understood how she’d feel.

The boat bumped the jetty. Avelyn climbed out, his hands shaking as he lifted his bag and paid Redspear. He was not afraid of this place, but he was afraid of who he was when he was here. Rome Avelyn seemed solid in Rome. But here, in the salt . . .

“Know where you’re going?” Redspear asked him, taking the horse’s bridle. There was a stable on the dock.

Avelyn pointed to the next island on, only just sketched out in the mist, where a strangely proportioned tower loomed. “North to An El,” he said. Hreod required you to know the compass directions of any place you mentioned, and even any object you wanted to emphasise. You couldn’t say, Pass me that thing on your left. That was nonsense in Hreod. You had to say, That thing in the northwest. He had no idea why. There was only one other language in the world that did it, somewhere in Australia, and they didn’t know why either. It always sounded as though everyone expected everything, even buildings, not to be where you’d left them.

At the mention of the abbey, Redspear’s cheer dulled, and she made the antler sign of the Salt King.

2 Jesuit training took ten years. It was ominously called formation, as if a finished Jesuit was a geological phenomenon built from terrifying pressures. You studied philosophy, then you did a pilgrimage in poverty, then you were posted to a ministry somewhere so desperate that they could forgive you for being a Jesuit, then there was more study, more ministry, and then finally, as the capstone to it all, you taught at a secondary school, because once you’d done that, you’d be grateful to be posted to a war zone.

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