The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Lord Dunsany’s Teapot By Naomi Novik

The accidental harmony of the trenches during the war produced, sometimes, odd acquaintances. It was impossible not to feel a certain kinship with a man having lain huddled and nameless in the dirt beside him for hours, sharing the dubious comfort of a woolen scarf pressed over the mouth and nose while eyes streamed, stinging, and gunpowder bursts from time to time illuminated the crawling smoke in colors: did it have a greenish cast? And between the moments of fireworks, whispering to one another too low and too hoarsely to hear even unconsciously the accents of the barn or the gutter or the halls of the public school.

What became remarkable about Russell, in the trenches, was his smile: or rather that he smiled, with death walking overhead like the tread of heavy boots on a wooden floor above a cellar. Not a wild or wandering smile, reckless and ready to meet the end, or a trembling rictus; an ordinary smile to go with the whispered, “Another one coming, I think,” as if speaking of a cricket ball instead of an incendiary; only friendly, with nothing to remark upon.

The trench had scarcely been dug. Dirt shook loose down upon them, until they might have been part of the earth, and when the all-clear sounded at last out of a long silence, they stood up still equals under a coat of mud, until Russell bent down and picked up the shovel, discarded, and they were again officer and man.

But this came too late: Edward trudged back with him, side by side, to the more populated regions of the labyrinth, still talking, and when they had reached Russell’s bivouac, he looked at Edward and said, “Would you have a cup of tea?”

The taste of the smoke was still thick on Edward’s tongue, in his throat, and the night had curled up like a tiger and gone to sleep around them. They sat on Russell’s cot while the kettle boiled, and he poured the hot water into a fat old teapot made of iron, knobby, over the cheap and bitter tea leaves from the ration. Then he set it on the little camp stool and watched it steep, a thin thread of steam climbing out of the spout and dancing around itself in the cold air.

Yishan Li’s depiction of Lord Dunsany’s Teapot, from the forthcoming Novik-Li graphic novel “Ten Days to Glory: Demon Tea and Lord Dunsany.”

The rest of his company were sleeping, but Edward noticed their cots were placed away, as much as they could be in such a confined space; Russell had a little room around his. He looked at Russell: under the smudges and dirt, weathering; not a young face. The nose was a little crooked and so was the mouth, and the hair brushed over the forehead was sandy brown and wispy in a vicarish way, with several years of thinning gone.

“A kindness to the old-timer, I suppose,” Russell said. “Been here—five years now, or near enough. So they don’t ask me to shift around.”

“They haven’t made you lance-jack,” Edward said, the words coming out before he could consider all the reasons a man might not have received promotion, of which he would not care to speak.

“I couldn’t,” Russell said, apologetic. “Who am I, to be sending off other fellows, and treating them sharp if they don’t?”

“Their corporal, or their sergeant,” Edward said, a little impatient with the objection, “going in with them, not hanging back.”

“O, well,” Russell said, still looking at the teapot. “It’s not the same for me to go.”

He poured out the tea, and offered some shavings off a small, brown block of sugar. Edward drank: strong and bittersweet, somehow better than the usual. The teapot was homely and common. Russell laid a hand on its side as if it were precious, and said it had come to him from an old sailor, coming home at last to rest from traveling.

“Do you ever wonder, are there wars under the sea?” Russell said. His eyes had gone distant. “If all those serpents and the kraken down there, or some other things we haven’t names for, go to battle over the ships that have sunk, and all their treasure?”

“And mermen dive down among them, to be counted brave,” Edward said, softly, not to disturb the image that had built clear in his mind: the great writhing beasts, tangled masses striving against one another in the endless cold, dark depths, over broken ships and golden hoards, spilled upon the sand, trying to catch the faintest gleam of light. “To snatch some jewel to carry back, for a courting gift or an heirloom of their house.”

Russell nodded, as if to a commonplace remark. “I suppose it’s how they choose their lords,” he said, “the ones that go down and come back; and their king came up from the dark once with a crown—beautiful thing, rubies and pearls like eggs, in gold.”

The tea grew cold before they finished building the undersea court, turn and turn about, in low voices barely above the nasal breathing of the men around them.

IT SKIRTED THE lines of fraternization, certainly; but it could not have been called deliberate. There was always some duty or excuse which brought them into one another’s company to begin with, and at no regular interval. Of course, even granting this, there was no denying it would have been more appropriate for Edward to refuse the invitation, or for Russell not to have made it in the first place. Yet, somehow, each time tea was offered, and accepted.

The hour was always late, and if Russell’s fellows had doubts about his company, they never raised their heads from their cots to express it either by word or look. Russell made the tea, and began the storytelling, and Edward cobbled together castles with him, shaped of steam and fancy, drifting upwards and away from the trenches.

He would walk back to his own cot afterwards still warm through and lightened. He had come to do his duty, and he would do it, but there was something so much vaster and more dreadful than he had expected in the wanton waste upon the fields, in the smothered silence of the trenches: all of them already in the grave and merely awaiting a final confirmation. But Russell was still alive, so Edward might be as well. It was worth a little skirting of regulations.

HE ONLY HALF-HEARD Russell’s battalion mentioned in the staff meeting, with one corner of his preoccupied mind; afterwards, he looked at the assignment: a push to try and open a new trench, advancing the line.

It was no more than might be and would be asked of any man, eventually; it was no excuse to go by the bivouac that night with a tin of his own tea, all the more precious because Beatrice somehow managed to arrange for it to win through to him, through some perhaps questionable back channel. Russell said nothing of the assignment, though Edward could read the knowledge of it around them: for once, not all the other men were sleeping, a few curled protectively around their scratching hands, writing letters in their cots.

“Well, that’s a proper cup,” Russell said softly, as the smell climbed out of the teapot, fragrant and fragile. The brew, when he poured it, was clear amber-gold, and made Edward think of peaches hanging in a garden of shining, fruit-heavy trees, a great, sighing breath of wind stirring all the branches to a shake.

For once, Russell did not speak as they drank the tea. One after another, the men around them put down their pens and went to sleep. The peaches swung from the branches, very clear and golden in Edward’s mind. He kept his hands close around his cup.

“That’s stirred him a bit, it has,” Russell said, peering under the lid of the teapot; he poured in some more water. For a moment, Edward thought he saw mountains, too, beyond the orchard-garden: green-furred peaks with clouds clinging to their sides like loose eiderdown. A great wave of homesickness struck him very nearly like a blow, though he had never seen such mountains. He looked at Russell, wondering.

“It’ll be all right, you know,” Russell said.

“Of course,” Edward said: the only thing that could be said, prosaic and untruthful; the words tasted sour in his mouth after the clean taste of the tea.

“No, what I mean is, it’ll be all right,” Russell said. He rubbed a hand over the teapot. “I don’t like to say, because the fellows don’t understand, but you see him, too; or at least as much of him as I do.”

“Him,” Edward repeated.

“I don’t know his name,” Russell said thoughtfully. “I’ve never managed to find out; I don’t know that he hears us at all, or thinks of us. I suppose if he ever woke up, he might be right annoyed with us, sitting here drinking up his dreams. But he never has.”

It was not their usual storytelling, but something with the uncomfortable savor of truth. Edward felt as though he had caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of something too vast to be looked at directly or all at once: a tail shining silver-green sliding through the trees; a great green eye, like oceans, peering back with drowsy curiosity. “But he’s not in there,” he said involuntarily.

Russell shrugged expressively. He lifted off the lid and showed Edward: a lump fixed to the bottom of the pot, smooth, white, glimmering like a pearl, irregular yet beautiful, even with the swollen tea-leaves like kelp strewn over and around it.

He put the lid back on, and poured out the rest of the pot. “So it’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be all right, while I have him. But you see why I couldn’t send other fellows out. Not while I’m safe from all this, and they aren’t.”

An old and battered teapot made talisman of safety, inhabited by some mystical guardian: it ought to have provoked the same awkward sensation as speaking to an earnest spiritualist, or an excessively devoted missionary; it called for polite agreement and withdrawal. “Thank you,” Edward said instead; he was comforted, and glad to be so.

Whatever virtue lived there in the pitted iron, it was no more difficult to believe in than the blighted landscape above their trenches, the coils of hungry, barbed, black wire snaking upon the ground, and the creeping poisonous smoke that covered the endless bodies of the dead. Something bright and shining ought not to be more impossible than that; and even if it was not strong enough to stand against all devastation, there was pleasure in thinking one life might be spared by its power.

THEY BROUGHT HIM the teapot three days later: Russell had no next of kin with a greater claim. Edward thanked them and left the teapot in a corner of his bag, and did not take it out again. Many men he knew had died, comrades in arms, friends; but Russell lying on the spiked and poisoned ground, breath seared and blood draining, hurt the worse for seeming wrong.

Edward dreamed of sitting with Russell: the dead man’s skin clammy-grey, blood streaking the earthenware where his fingers cupped it, where his lips touched the rim, and floating over the surface of the tea. “Well, and I was safe, like I said,” Russell said. Edward shuddered out of the dream, and washed his face in the cold water in his jug; there were flakes of ice on the surface.

He went forward himself, twice, and was not killed; he shot several men, and sent others to die. There was a commendation, at one point. He accepted it without any sense of pride. In the evenings, he played cards with a handful of other officers, where they talked desultorily of plans, and the weather, and a few of the more crude of conquests either real or hoped-for in the French villages behind the lines. His letters to Beatrice grew shorter. His supply of words seemed to have leached away into the dirt.

His own teapot was on his small burner to keep warm when the air raid sounded; an hour later, after the all-clear, it was a smoking cinder, the smell so very much like the acrid bite of gas that he flung it as far up over the edge of the trench as he could manage, to get it away, and took out the other teapot, to make a fresh cup and wash away the taste.

And it was only a teapot: squat and unlovely except for the smooth, pearlescent lump inside, some accident of its casting. He put in the leaves and poured the water from the kettle. He was no longer angry with himself for believing, only distantly amused, remembering; and sorry, with that same distance, for Russell, who had swallowed illusions for comfort.

He poured his cup and raised it and drank without stopping to inhale the scent or to think of home; and the pain startled him for being so vivid. He worked his mouth as though he had only burned his tongue and not some unprepared and numbed corner of his self. He found himself staring blindly at the small, friendly blue flame beneath the teapot. The color was the same as a flower that grew only on the slopes of a valley on the other side of the world, where no man had ever walked, which a bird with white feathers picked to line its nest so the young, when they were born, were soft grey and tinted blue, with pale yellow beaks held wide to call for food in voices that chimed like bells.

The ringing in his ears from the sirens went quiet. He understood Russell then finally; and wept a little, without putting down the cup. He held it between his hands while the heat but not the scent faded, and sipped peace as long as it lasted.

The teapot is unremarkable in itself: a roundbellied, squat thing of black, enameled iron, with the common nail-head pattern rubbed down low over the years and a spout perhaps a little short for its width; the handle has been broken and mended, and the lid has only a small, stubby knob. Dr. Lambshead is not known to have used the teapot, which wears a thin layer of grey dust, but a small attached label indicates it was acquired at an estate auction held in Ireland circa 1957.