Excerpt: The Book of Days

Prologue

They met at the halfway point between the heavens and the earth, two shadowy figures waiting at the crux of the dawn. Each night they met and each night they failed to engage the other in the simplest conversation, until the man with the diamond eyes tossed a penny high into the stratosphere and they wordlessly bet on who would be the first to break the silence.

On the seventh night a star fell, blazing from the heavens, and the man calmly reached out a hand and plucked the star from the sky. It sizzled in his palm. The old crone shuffled closer, staring at the now-cooling penny, Lincoln’s beard melting down his neck.

‘Oh bloody hell,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Heads. You win.’

The man’s lips parted into a hard smile, and he secreted the coin away in the folds of his coat. ‘Now that we have that sorted out,’ he said. ‘Let’s get down to business.’

The crone squatted on the damp surface, reached into the recesses of her ragged gown, and produced a handful of what looked like blue light; it sparked and spat as it attempted to escape from her clenched fist. Then, turning her back on the man, she hunched over and muttered snatches of half-nonsense words, and soon a blue fire was burning brightly.

She glanced up to where he still stood, his features shifting in the deceitful light of the fire and the rapidly approaching dawn. ‘I can’t stand the sky,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘The clouds are so musty and dewstained.’

He grunted his acknowledgement as she started to hum a tuneless ditty, the fire seeping into her old bones and casting a horrific shade of bruised indigo about the crow’s nests at the corner of her milky eyes.

She carried a bag about with her, held close to her heart. It appeared to be made out of cobwebs, and shadow, and memory. And it was from this bag that she produced a delicate scroll and a feather quill, the likes of which are normally seen clutched in the hands of long-dead poets.

‘You don’t mind if I…?’ she asked the man.

He shook his head and sat down himself, stretching out cat-like on the damp cloud. ‘You know why we’re here. I can wait a little longer.’

She scribbled away for a few moments more, her handwriting tiny and illegible, even by the light of the gathering dawn. Finally, she smacked her lips together, stuck the quill firmly into the cloud, and blew on the drying ink of the parchment. ‘That’s another one ready for the morning. Most people assume that nothing happens during the night time, but they forget the dreams. Dreams are the hardest to capture, as they’re unique to each sleeper.’ She shifted and scratched behind her ear. ‘How is your family, by the way?’

Her companion, who had taken out a strange ivory pipe and was now packing foul-smelling grasses down into the bowl, paused. ‘They are fine,’ he remarked. ‘My second wife just gave birth to my first son.’

‘Congratulations.’

He accepted her felicitations with an incline of his head and continued to pack his pipe without looking at her, stopping only when the contents of the bowl had been flattened to his satisfaction. He then reached into the fire and plucked out a sparking flame, which he used to light his pipe.

They sat there in silence while the geese flew past them in formation, and the sun chased away the last of the errant stars. The smoke from his pipe smelled of spices – cardamom, myrrh, and frankincense.

Finally, he plucked his pipe from his mouth and blew out an orange-tinged cloud of smoke; he watched the wind whip away the last of the smoke formation before saying: ‘It is time. You know what we have to do.’

The crone, who up until that moment had been happily occupied with thoughts of her own, reached in her bag and pulled out a battered chessboard. She extinguished the fire with one foul gust of breath and opened out the chessboard between them. The board was old, not old in the sense that Napoleon or Machiavelli had planned their first campaigns on it, but rather old in that every other chessboard was based off this one – that man had not been civilised enough to play chess when this board was carved out of obsidian and pearl, and had still looked to the gods to help them make sense of their world.

The man coughed discreetly. The pieces were missing.

The crone muttered to herself about losing things in her old age and shook out her great mane of silver hair; thirty pieces tumbled out onto the board. She ignored these as the man went about setting up the game, and instead placed her hand over her heart. She held her empty hand out, palm up, and the two Queens appeared with a faint hum.

‘I always like to keep them close to my heart,’ she said, and placed them in their proper positions.

The man pocketed his pipe and extended his hand to the chessboard. ‘Black or white?’

She giggled at this, a harsh sound that somehow seemed out of place that close to the heavens. ‘Black. As always.’

So they started to play, the strange man and the old crone, with only the sun and the occasional bird as witnesses to their battle. They played slowly and seriously, both contemplating each move as though their lives depended on the flow and ebb of the game. When the man’s knight took the crone’s stony bishop, she retaliated by taking his rook. The play continued, the two players’ moves matching in skill and ferocity until the board contained nothing more than two Queens and two Kings, facing off - pearl-faced and black of heart - against their counterparts.

The crone stopped. ‘Bugger,’ she said.

Her opponent sighed and moved closer to the chessboard, as if to look into its soul and find some way of outmatching the woman who sat opposite to him. He appeared perplexed. He shook his head, running his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. ‘This happens every time.’

‘Always,’ the crone agreed. ‘Just when I think I have you, you pull some trick and we end up right where we’ve started. I’ve waited a thousand years to beat you.’

She gently fingered the black Queen’s crown before standing up and shaking herself out like a dog. ‘Ah well, it can’t be helped. This time tomorrow?’

But the man didn’t move. He remained staring at the chessboard, his eyes blank and unreadable.

The crone shuffled about, retrieving the opened scroll, and her quill.

‘What if it could be helped…?’ the man said suddenly.

‘What could, dear?’ She squatted once more; her snapping and protesting bones sounded like the crackling of a roast pig over a spit.

He said nothing for the longest of times, but the crone could wait. He was generally a man of few words, and she had learnt long ago not to force his tongue.

Finally, he spoke. ‘I knew of a creature once whose only occupation – only happiness – was counting the grains of sand at a particular beach. He came to me at the beginning of his life and said, “What should I do so that my life shall never be idle?” And I told him to count the grains of sand, for he could surely never come to the end of his task even if he lived for five thousand years. Well, he began to count. And he had not spent five hundred years of his life counting when the sea began to dry up. I speak, of course, of the Sea of Lamentation.’

The crone nodded her understanding. ‘It began to evaporate on the Duke and the Duchess’ wedding night. Must have been quite a night, I always thought.’

‘Yes, well this creature kept counting, unaware of the changes taking place. He had just reached a momentous number - of which a million is but a mote in its eye – when he looked up to see that the beach he knew was no longer there and all his precious grains of sand had turned to emeralds and jewels in his fingers. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘To tell you the truth…’ The crone bit her lip and scratched at a flakey patch on her scalp. ‘… I have no idea what you’re getting at. Perhaps if you could explain it…’

‘Don’t you see?’ He stood now, and she saw him, proud, and magnificent, outlined against the sun. ‘We are that creature. We’ve been playing this game against each other for as long as I can remember, but what if the circumstances could be different? What if our sand turned to emeralds?’

Her eyes shone as she picked up the black Queen and held it pressed against her heart. ‘You mean… one of us could win?’

He seemed at once terrible and ageless to her, even though she had been plying her trade long before he had been thought into existence; her place was with the first human who first called out to the stars for guidance.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

‘How?’

As he outlined his plan to her, the old crone grew more and more incredulous. What he was thinking of was impossible, and blasphemous just to think of. But if it could be done – if a human could be made to deviate from the pages written in their life book – then they would have the key to the greatest game of strategy ever played this side of the heavens.

‘But it simply can’t be done.’ Hope clawed at her breast, the kind of desperate hope that comes only with the opportunity of a lifetime. She’d had more than enough lifetimes, however, and more than enough disappointments. ‘You should know that better than anyone. I write each book of life and what I write must happen – will happen – there is no question of anything else, even if we find the right mortal.’

His smile was shockingly white against his dark and handsome face, but there was nothing pleasant in that smile, just naked opportunity. ‘Perhaps we just need to give them a little persuasion.’