The Castle of Kern

The rune stone lay in a nook at the far end of a lightless cave, accessible via a steep and narrow stairwell known only to the masons of Kern.

George Sturridge, Master Mason, lifted the tablet of stone from its narrow perch, and held it in the flickering light of Erika Smoody’s candle. A strange resonance emanated from the tablet into the bedrock foundations of the Castle. He ran his calloused fingers across the glyphs and letters.

“Of Kern Rock in the beginning. Of Kern Rock in the end,” the mason read the puzzling incantation out loud to the young woman.

 “What is the meaning of these marks?”, said Erika, pointing at three crudely-carved crosses. 

Sturridge, a thickset, but elderly man of ponderous manner, had dwelt with this question for a lifetime.

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Kern Castle was a rambling concatenation of buildings, secular and sacred, which in their design described the ebb and flow of history, of religions, tribes, kings and queens, of plague and plenty, of tyranny and rebellion, of war and peace. The Castle lay in a secluded valley and was tenuously connected to the world by a rutted track that ran through miles of forest.

But the world came knocking. The port of Evanskold prospered from trade, sprawled into a city, with streets and houses that advanced on Kern Castle like an army. In time, with proximity and familiarity, the Evanskold burghers and merchants grew contemptuous of the Castle, angered by the heavy taxes required for maintenance of an edifice without utility.

A nation at peace looks inward, becomes petty, selfish and spiteful; discontent was broad spread, but loud complaints from Evanskold reached the Royal Palace and became an annoyance, a hot spot beneath the Throne. The King, hearing too much about Kern Castle, and having no interest in visiting Evanskold, deflected the irritation downwards into the State apparatus, where it was transformed into bureaucratic hostility, amplified by low-level officials into institutional rage. 

Reginald Cravenhead, a venal, callous man, was appointed Administrator of Kern Castle, and became the low point to which institutional rage and corruption ran. He descended on the Castle like an embroidered bat, all flap and flounce and obscenely dandified, accompanied by an accomplice, Oblate Sterne, a cadaverous beanpole, expert in the abuse of arithmetic and the law. Kern Castle was easy plunder; the masonry, the copper and lead, disassembled, could be sold and skimmed for massive personal profit. They were soon mad with avarice.

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Atop the flat West Wing roof, John Parrot, apprentice to George Sturridge, knelt in front of a massive coping stone. In one hand he held a heavy mallet, in the other a chisel, angled for the blow. A group of novice monks watched with curiosity as he cross-hatched the end-face. Clunk, clunk, scratch and scrape, clunk, clunk. Parrot’s arm ratcheted and released, ratchet and release, like a clockwork escarpment. Sweat upon his brow, stone dust on his hands, the mallet hand ached, the chisel hand throbbed. Clunk, clunk, clunk.

Mr. Sturridge came along, ran his fingers across the facet, and grunted his approval. The quality of the work was not in the stone, it was in the man.

The young monks were transfixed by the labor of others and would have idled for hours. “Vespers! It’s nearly Vespers!” said Father Thomas, which broke them from their reverie. The sun was setting over the distant City of Evanskold.

“Mr. Sturridge, your stonework enchants the young monks. It is as if time slows and they forget themselves”, said Father Thomas.

“Time is going by all too fast, Father”, said Sturridge to his old friend, “and now we have this madman making our lives miserable”. Cravenhead was watching them from the shadows of his office up above the worksite.

The setting sun, the day’s work complete, it was a melancholy moment for the two old men.

“All things come to an end,” said Father Thomas, running his hand along the sharp edge of a merlon cap.

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Cravenhead stood at the window of his office on the third floor of Schist tower and looked down at the two old men – the mason and the monk - as they conferred in the dying light. Plinths, pillars, pinnacles and finials were arranged around them on the rooftop, staged for installation. Scaffolding, pulleys and chains, spoke of Sturridge’s intentions, which were to continue the work, despite his instructions to the contrary. 

Sturridge was a haughty, proud man and Cravenhead relished the opportunity to take him down a peg or two. He turned to Sterne, who was standing at his shoulder, “let’s deal with the man. Show him how things will be,” said Cravenhead, “he has spent his entire life in this place and knows nothing of the world”.

Sterne nodded; that was his understanding too.

“Have we a safe place to land once this is over, Sterne?” said Cravenhead, who had tasked his accomplice with planning the next step in their career, or their bolt hole, depending on how things worked out.

“We do, Sir. I am assured by the Lord Chancellor himself that we will be assigned to Channington Palace, where you will be appointed Commissioner of the Turnpikes. Old Clatterhorn languishes like a dog in prison, his men were ploughed into the highway.” Sterne took immense pleasure in other people’s distress.

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Mason Sturridge stood awkwardly at the threshold of the office in Schist tower. Cravenhead sat behind an large oak desk, Oblate Sterne sat on a wooden chair that faced the desk and the window. There was no option for Sturridge but to stand while the two bureaucrats concluded some other business. The curtain was drawn, obscuring the tower and the view of the West Wing rooftop. The room was dark, Cravenhead had the grim countenance of judge, until he sat back, whereupon he had the appearance of executioner too.

“We are at war with sloth, waste and incompetence,” said Cravenhead, setting aside a page of notes, “the King himself loosed an arrow, and Kern Castle is its target. You, Sturridge, are its target. We are shutting your work down, and we are shutting this godforsaken place down”.

“The work, it is finished,” said Sterne. It was as if he was flicking away a fly.

“The King commands that we end this nonsense, once and for all,” said Cravenhead .

“You can’t just shut us down, Cravenhead”

There was the sound of Sterne drawing breath and then silence. Cravenhead looked about to burst with fury, but it was Sterne that spoke first, “The proper address is ‘Lord Kern’”, said Sterne.

“There hasn’t been a Lord of the Castle in more than a century. It is a preposterous claim, and you are preposterous men, " said Sturridge, his fists clenched.

Sterne, though taller and younger, was no match for the mason in a fair fight, but angered, his hand went to the switchblade in his pocket. Cravenhead, though, moved on from the slur, and was smiling slyly.

Obscured from sight by the drawn curtain, there was a commotion outside, the sound of a man shouting and screaming.

“I have no patience for you Sturridge. Comply with my instructions, or I will have you thrown into the dungeon, to wallow with the eels and dine with the rats” said Cravenhead.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t have the authority over me or my men”, said Sturridge.

Oblate Sterne sneered at Sturridge, “Mason, you talk to great men as if you were their equal, you speak on matters about which you know nothing. You misread things and live in a fantastical world. We are not asking you what should be done, we are telling you what will be done.”

The cries outside were getting louder, more desperate. Sturridge sensed that he had stepped into a sinister play and faced a terrible denouement.

“What’s happening out there? Why is the curtain drawn?” said Sturridge, taking a step toward Cravenhead. 

 Sterne rose from his chair, intercepted him and pressed a long boney index finger at the mason’s chest, his other hand caressed the knife, “You misunderstand the situation, Sturridge”

“The law is very clear. We have absolute authority within the walls of this Castle, and you may see for yourself”, with which Cravenhead pulled aside the curtain, revealing the apprentice, John Parrot, lashed by the ankle, dangling upside down from the scaffolding, sixty feet in the air. A phalanx of soldiers heaved at a rope from below, and Parrot shot up and crashed into a cross-brace; blood flowed from his skull, and he was screaming.

Cravenhead growled like a dog, “you, your damned crew, the fucking monks, the Castle staff, every shit-faced cretin… you have until day-end to leave the Castle. The outside world has arrived. We are on the inside of this rotting corpse.”

“Get your stinking self away from this place”, threatened Sterne, the blade glinting in his hand

Cravenhead raged gibberish as Sturridge left the office and slammed the door.

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The craft of stone masonry was not easily comprehended by an outsider. It was not just cutting, carving, moving, placing and fixing stone. It was not just the arrangement of plinth and pillar, the alignment of column and collar, nor was it the tensioned arch, the push and pull of the buttress, or the weight and press of a keystone or a capstone. It was not cement and mortar that held Kern Castle stones together. It was something missing from this inventory, something that could not be seen and could not be named.

It was whispered prayers and dreams mixed in the grout, cries of pain and despair trapped between the stones, it was muttered curses that slipped inside a joint, it was the seepage of blood, sweat and tears between the flagstones.

Sturridge, who’d spent a lifetime laboring on and within these walls, no longer knew where his flesh ended, and stone began.

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Sturridge came out of the stairwell from the refectory, heaved aside two of the guards. Parrot was flailing around, above, still alive.

“For God’s sake, get him down from there!” shouted Sturridge at his men, who were cowed into a corner of the rooftop by the soldiers.  Foreman Piper, a giant man with a slow wit, was like a pack mule, kicked; he shoved aside the guards, grabbed the rope, and lowered Parrot gently into a pile of sand. Piper, Sturridge, Erika and others carried the lad to a corner of the worksite where they tended his wounds with rags.  

There was hissed defiance and anger.

“We arrived to find it already done”, said Foreman Piper.

“We could do nothing.” said Erika

The anger surged in every direction, including at Sturridge; he had failed to protect Parrot.

“The whole thing was sprung upon me,” said Sturridge. He described what had transpired in Cravenhead’s office, “we have until sunset, and then the bloodshed will begin.”

“What can we do?” said Foreman Piper. Where would they live? What work could they do? How would they feed and clothe their families? What would become of the Castle, of their work?

“Get me the rune stone, but don’t let the guards see it”, said Sturridge to Erika, who, being a fair-haired beauty she drew the soldiers’ attention, but it was to her carriage that they were attentive and not to what she might be carrying, “there is no time to spare”. Erika ran from the rooftop, through the castle, down the secret passage and into the cave, unmolested, and she soon returned to the rooftop with the rune stone concealed beneath her tunic.

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The masons were back at work, defiant, observed by a small group of monks. Cravenhead, watching this from his office window, flew into a fit. His soldiers were standing about like fools. “Make them crack some heads, run them through, throw Sturridge over the wall, kill them, if necessary,” he shouted. Sterne ran from the room.

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Foreman Piper winched the last coping stone into position. Parrot shimmied it into place with an iron bar, said, “let it down,” at which Piper released the catch on the pulley and the stone fell in place perfectly aligned and so snug between its siblings that grout spewed out of the tight gaps. It was affixed in the parapet, in the finished wall; good for a thousand years.

Sturridge took the rune-stone from Erika’s extended hands. “It is the final piece”, he said, mounting the tablet-shaped stone into the base of the Schist tower, where it held fast against the mortar.

He pressed his thumb into the first of the three cross-marks and whispered a wish into a fissure in the wall. The stones groaned, cracked and moved, suddenly alive, and out of the wall emerged the hideous gargoyle of Oblate Sterne. Father Thomas, seeing this, fell to his knees, and prayed.

Sturridge pressed his thumb into the second cross-mark, and whispered a second wish, into the ear of the Oblate, and the stones boiled and bubbled about, and from nothing there emerged a second gargoyle, more terrible than the first. It was Cravenhead, his face contorted in frozen anguish. 

“God forbid”, said Father Thomas. 

Sturridge pressed his thumb into the third indentation, whispered a third wish, this time into the ear of Cravenhead. 

A great stillness fell over the castle.

“This is the end of time,” said Erika. The rune stone dissolved into the castle wall.

Sturridge stood back from the wall, and time slowed, and then the passage of time stopped, not everywhere, just within the walls of the castle.

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It was perplexing to the captain of the guards, who watched this play out with growing confusion. The sun was lodged in the sky and would not set. The hour and minute hands of the tower clock were fixed permanently at ten past four. His men stood at the ready on the rooftop of the west wing, waiting for a signal from the window in the Schist tower, but none came.  Their weapons grew heavy in their hands, the men became thirsty and weary of the wait, then they laid down their cutlasses and went to their quarters. The day seemed to last forever, some of the soldiers left the Castle and made their way to Evanskold.

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It was ten past four, the sun remained suspended in the sky. It had been a long and busy day; much had been accomplished, and much remained to be done. Erika directed the construction of the walls that would house the new observatory, Parrot carved a frieze for placement above the portal. Piper, now master mason, was standing at a trestle table, examining the plans.

Father Thomas and George Sturridge, both wizened and frail, sat like small children atop the parapet, their feet dangling loosely back and forth, their heels banging against the stone. It was ten past four, the sun warmed them, a gentle breeze cooled them, the sound of the worksite lulled them, but in the distance a terrible progression was playing out that seemed about to obliterate the whole world. The City of Evanskold poured toward them, swamping valleys, knocking down hills, smashing the woodlands, destroying the good land, and leaving behind a denuded place. George Sturridge watched as the detritus of the City crashed against the battlements, swirled around the Castle, threatened the end of things; he could feel the stones of Kern Rock vibrate beneath his hands, but the walls stood firm.