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Newtons Sleep by Daniel O’Mahony First published in New Zealand in 2008 by Random Static Ltd PO Box 10104 Wellington 6143 is edition published online in 2009 www.randomstatic.net Newtons Sleep copyright © Daniel O’Mahony 2008 Cover and title page illustrations by Emma Weakley Created using X TE EX and GIMP on Ubuntu linux All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Obviously excepting the ones based on real historical persons – presumably all of the dead variety by now. All rights reserved. All lefts gregarious. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without either express written permission from the publisher, or special dispensation from the Archbishop of Cydonia Mensae. Faction Paradox created and owned by Lawrence Miles, licensed to Random Static Ltd. National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data O’Mahony, Daniel, 1973- Newtons sleep / by Daniel O’Mahony. (Faction Paradox) ISBN 978-0-473-12498-4 I. Title. II. Series. 823.914—dc 22 Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except in so far as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed. A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed. To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the action of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction. Book One: e Rituals of the King Chapter 0: e Waste Book Impelled as though in sympathy with the earth, a spittle’s-worth of dark humour slips from between the high branches of the tree into the mild air. So it plunges from its zenith, drawn by its yearning for the honest Lincolnshire lime. us does base matter descend, while pure spirit rises to join the light. is hungry glob does not however find the soil, but impacts instead upon the head of a boy stretched out in quiet contemplation upon the ground at the foot of the tree. So a story is a-borning, one that shall bear repetition until Judgement and yet grow more grand and pregnant with each telling. Like a coin it shall be passed from party to party, its sovereign features slowly obliterated by the erosion of hands, until the mark- ings be smoothed and unrecognised. us the fallen matter, which in fact most keenly resembles the manure from which all garden idylls spring, becomes in fiction a happier symbol; how sly that it should be the apple, that sweet fruit of bitter knowledge and ex- ile. But this is not Eden bounded by the Witham, and this boy, this youth, is no Adam. He is a child of nine summers with shite on his brow. Observe the boy, on his blanket of warm grass, in his cradle of grey tortured tree- roots, in his open-roofed bedchamber of hazy autumnal warmth. Observe his lank limbs, spread careless and empty of purpose. Observe his lolling head, the blond crop of his scalp, the beak’d face, the eyes oscillating palpably below the drooped lids. Youmight think him idle. You might think him asleep, and he is dreaming in his own fashion, but he is not idle. Sloth is not his sin; he has spent his day dialing (it having been determined that he is not fitted as a shepherd, neither as a merchant, and is therefore doomed to be that least practical of animals, an educated man). In his dreams he dials still, smoothing and shaping raw stone with a diamond-sharp blue blade. It is a more precise instrument than he has ever found in his waking life, making for a nicer dial on which ever finer gradients of shadow will reveal the stations of the hour in detail unknown even to the astrologers of Cathay or Ægypt. ese are, he contemplates in his dream, the oldest machines to be the work of man; only the heavens themselves turn on a finer and more perfect mechanism. In his dream he builds a great Palace of Time to contain all his dials, a plain wood house of ever-expanding wings and atria. is is Heaven and he will be its architect. ese are not the dreams of an idle child. But he is a child of man and therefore sinful, and this sin – because he follows the true faith – cannot be wiped clean by the sanctified pisspot-fonts of Rome or all her whorish indulgences. If not sloth, then – what? It is not gluttony, his meat is on the brain not the bone. Lust, then? Lust has its smiling possibilities. ese are cold years, but the summers are yet warm enough for the local children to seek out cool and lonely waters. ey go in groups to bathe in the ponds or the streams, this lad among them, though he is neither an intrepid boy nor a healthy one and is content only to wade while his half-friends sink naked to swim below the line of the water. Once in jest they caught him and held his head under the surface, untroubled by his thrashing, releasing him at their leisure. His skull swelled when he broke into the free air, while blood and 2 N S bile dribbled from his nose and mouth; he had swallowed from the stream, and was afflicted for a month by fevers and flux. ey had most blasphemously baptised him, but while a-bed he had contemplated the quality of light that penetrated the murk, and found there a riddle that he turned casually in his mind. He will unlock it later; more often his thoughts turned to the bodies of his companions, friends and villains, sons and daughters alike; but this is the innocent curiosity of a child. As an adult he will lust for men – and also for women, but most often for men – but it will be a penitent’s flagellant lust, a tamed thing that inspires as much disgust as pleasure. It brings home proper Godly guilt as its harvest. Do not look for lust here; it does not drive him. Oh, but there is pride. His sleep and his dreams are those of a woken mind. He merely covers his eyes from the sun, which lies in a warm pane across his face. e sun has been a pitiful thing in these years of his life; there is a cold winter coming in, but there are better days yet to come. He dreams of how he will fill those better days. e shite spatters on his face as though it were a new thought, inspiration from the divine. I will have a book, he decides. He can see it already, waiting for him on a trader’s stall. A heavy book, with yellowed pages that smell of must and learning, though all those sheets be yet blank. It was once proudly bound, but the stitching has disrepaired in its travels, its spine infested with spiders and small insects just as the spine of man contains his unproven seed. He sees himself, a little older, touching the book, worshipping it, wooing it. Each season it is taken, and each season it returns, and he comes as though a puppy in love to watch it lay upon its stall. How he fears that other hands will spoil her. How he yearns to spill ink on her pages with his thoughts and designs. e stallsman, once suspicious of his attentions, grows to love this gangly moon-struck boy. – You might save enough coin to buy it (says he) – And how long will that take? (replies the boy, now truly a youth). e book’s keeper laughs, then shakes his head sadly, then laughs again and ruffles the youth’s bowl of hair. – Maybe one day you could prevail on someone to present it you? (he speculates, correctly as it will transpire) – And will you keep it for me until that day? – (another laugh) I must sell it to who will pay for it. Oh, don’t look so glum, boy! ere will be other books. – But I want that one! One day I will have a waste book of blank leaves that I will decorate. Beneath the tree, he shakes these thoughts from his head, somehow uncertain in himself that the dream has not already come to pass. In shaking, he feels the patch of foreign skin that now dislodges further and drips across his eye; and for a moment he thinks himself wounded; and for a moment he thinks himself dead. Lately cannonballs have flown their arcs, leaving the crystal sky unbroken, while on Earth their traces are all too visible: Englishmen reduced to piles of offal and powdered bone; the ruins of fastnesses, once impregnable, now shattered and exposed; the earth ripped asunder and scorched by sizzling violent impacts. e glass dome of the sky is undisturbed, and Heaven has never seemed so far away. So are proved the observations of the Europeans; of Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and of freshly-dead Cartesius (whose worlds whirl not by the command of the primum mobile but on dimly-imagined vortices): the celestial spheres are of a distance only God can conceive. Yet as the divine recedes, it seems also terribly closer. War on Earth presages War in Heaven; the strug- gle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living.

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