The shingle was so dry it squeaked under his shoes, and the sea at the bottom of the beach made no sound at all.
Julian stood with the others at the top of the slope with his jacket over his arm. It was past eleven at night and the stones still gave off the day's heat, the way a car bonnet does after a long drive. Nobody had told him the name of the coast. He had flown through two airports, slept in a hotel where the air conditioning had been switched off to save power, and been driven for four hours in a van with the windows papered over. The driver had not spoken once. When the van stopped, the driver had got out, walked away up the road and not come back.
There were eleven of them. A banker from Zurich who had shown Julian photographs of his daughters on the second flight. A woman from Lyon with grey hair cut short as a boy's. Three brothers from somewhere in the American south who wore the same blue blazer. Edwin Sallow, the keeper, a thin old man counting heads under his breath with a notebook open on his palm. And at the front, leaning on his stick, Ormsby.
Ormsby had telephoned in May, three weeks after the funeral.
"Your uncle was one of us," he had said. "So was his father, and his father's father. We'd like you to take his chair."
Julian had gone up to London to meet him in a club with green leather chairs and no other members in it. Ormsby had talked about the Temple and the lodges and the old houses in Prague and Edinburgh the way other old men talk about the schools they went to. "They thought it was about dinners," he had said, stirring his tea. "Charity. Ritual for the sake of ritual. Some of them still think so. It was always about one night. It's ours to be there."
He had called it the Concord, as if it were a room he had the key to.
Now he went down the beach alone, slowly, planting the stick between the stones. At the waterline he knelt with some difficulty. Julian saw him take a cockerel from the canvas bag he had carried all the way from the van. Ormsby said something over it that the wind took. It was not a prayer to anything Julian had ever heard prayed to. Then he cut its throat and held it out over the black water until it stopped moving, and let it go.
The sea took it without a splash.
For a moment nothing happened. The woman from Lyon let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. Then a hand closed round Julian's wrist.
He could not see it. He looked down and there was his own wrist in the starlight, and nothing round it, and the grip was there all the same, dry and cold, like the hand of a man who has been holding a glass of ice. A voice spoke at his ear in English with no accent he could place.
"Walk."
He walked. Ahead of him the others were walking too, down the squeaking stones toward the water, one or two of them with an arm held out stiffly as if someone were leading them by it. Julian's shoes reached the wet line. He waited for the cold to come over his ankles.
It never came. The stars went out instead.
There was nothing to see. He held his free hand up in front of his face and could not find it. He could hear his own breath and the guide's grip creaking the cuff of his shirt, and then even his footsteps stopped making a sound, although he could feel his feet still moving.
After a while a strip of ground came up in front of him, a yard wide, wet black stone with a faint light on it from no direction. Beyond its edges the dark went on. He understood, slowly, that he was being allowed to see that much and no more. Once the back of Ormsby's coat showed ahead of him, the hem dark with something, and then it was gone again as if a door had closed on it.
He lifted his wrist to look at his watch, and the guide let him see it. Eleven fifty-two. He walked for what felt like an hour and lifted it again. Eleven fifty-two. The next time he looked it said ten past four, and the second hand was going round backwards.
Then the stone strip went out and the wind came.
It smelled of salt and of something burnt, like hair held in a candle. He was not walking any more. His legs hung, and the grip on his wrist had become a grip under both his arms, and they were going fast over something that boomed and sucked a long way below. He could feel spray on his face and see none of it. Somewhere to his left a man shouted a word. It was the banker. Julian knew the voice from the plane, from the daughters, Clara and the little one. The word was "please", or the start of it.
Then something laughed close by in the dark, in a high voice like a child imitating a seagull, and the banker's shout stopped as if a hand had gone over it.
The grip under Julian's arms tightened until it hurt.
"Don't speak," the guide said at his ear. "They take what speaks."
Julian did not speak. He held his breath until his chest burned. The burnt smell went past, very close, and he felt a breath on his neck that was not the wind, and then it was gone. The booming below went on for a long time. He thought of his uncle at the kitchen table at the house, turning the pages of the family ledger for a boy of thirteen, one finger on each name as if checking it was still there.
He was put down on rock.
The guide let go of him. For a moment he stood blind and swaying, and then the dark thinned, and there was grey light with no sun in it, and black rock running down to a haze that lay over the water like breath on a window. The rock was warm under his hands when he put them down. He was on his knees. He did not remember kneeling.
The others were kneeling in a line along the rock to his right. He counted them out of habit, his uncle's habit. Nine. With him, ten. Sallow at the end of the line had his notebook open on his knee and his pencil moving, and his face was the colour of paper.
Nobody said the banker's name.
Ormsby had gone down on both knees with his stick laid on the rock beside him. His lips were moving. Julian could not hear him over the blood in his own ears.
Something was coming out of the haze.
He thought at first it was a building, the edge of some dark structure the mist was moving off. Then it moved again, and he saw that it was walking. It came up out of the haze onto the rock at the pace of a man walking home, and it was a man. It was the biggest man Julian had ever seen.
He could not have said how big. His eyes kept refusing the sum. The shoulders blotted out a long piece of the grey. Iron hung from the wrists, cuffs broken open, and a collar of iron sat round the neck with a short length of chain swinging from it, its last link split. More iron dragged between the ankles and scraped on the rock with each step. The face was red and broad and the hair was a mass of tight curls, wet with the haze. He did not hurry. He did not look at them. He looked out over their heads at the grey, the way a man looks at the weather from a doorstep.
Ormsby spoke. His voice was high and cracked and not like the voice in the club at all.
"We have waited for you. Our fathers waited for you. We are yours."
The giant did not answer. The chain at his neck swung and settled.
Ormsby turned his head and looked along the line, and Julian remembered what he was for. He got up. His knees nearly went. He had the folder under his arm, the one he had carried through two airports in a plastic sleeve: printouts from the news sites, satellite photographs of reservoirs with their mud showing, a map of the world with the new borders drawn on it in red. Ormsby had said the master would want to know how things stood. Ormsby had said the Gardners had always been the ones who carried the papers.
He took three steps forward on the warm rock and held the folder out in both hands, like a boy with a school report.
The giant's head came round.
It was the first time he had looked at any of them. Julian felt the look land on him as a pressure on his face and chest, the way the air shoves at you when a lorry goes past too close. His ears popped. He could not look away and he could not have said what colour the eyes were.
The giant spoke. His voice was hoarse and low, the voice of a man who has not used it in a long time, and quite ordinary.
"Do the palms of Baysan still bear fruit?"