Buddha came thundering up to them. ‘What are you two standin’ here like stunned mullets for? Get ’im!’
‘He . . . ’e was gettin’ in’ is grave,’ the first boy said, looking sick.
‘He was,’ the other confirmed faintly.
‘What?’ Buddha asked incredulously. The rest of the gang arrived and they all stared at Noah, still crouched atop the grave. ‘He was gettin’ in ’is grave,’ one of the boys told them.
‘He is a spook,’ a girl whispered nervously.
‘Maybe ’e’s a vampire,’ someone else said in a high-pitched, frightened voice.
Noah stood up suddenly, and they all jumped. He held his hands up to the sky and looked down at them.
‘So. You know. But I’ll make sure you don’t tell anyone the truth about me.’
It was broad daylight, but the sun gleamed oddly on Noah’s pale form and his body appeared to shimmer insubstantially in the heat haze. Unwittingly, some of the gang stepped back. One of the girls started crying.
‘Bullshit . . .’ Buddha said, but his face was pale. He took one step forward.
At that moment, a black shadow that had been creeping fractionally across the cemetery all afternoon reached Noah, and his pale dazzling form fell into darkness.
‘Run!’ one of the boys screamed, and they ran, scattering like leaves before a stormwind. All except Buddha.
‘Buddhaaa . . .’ Noah moaned, then he gave a low cackling laugh. That was enough for Buddha. His nerve broke and he turned to race after his disappearing gang.
Standing in the shadow, Noah was trembling from head to toe partly from fear and partly from triumph. He had frightened them off. Him.
But that shadow . . .
He looked up at the giant’s tower, a silhouette in the fading gold of the afternoon, and a strange feeling seemed to flow up into him from the grave under his feet. Slowly he turned to stare at the message inscribed in the stone, and his skin rose up into goosebumps.
Seek No More.
His eyes moved up, and he read the name above the message.
Kate lifted the hair from the nape of her neck, wondering what sort of weird kid would hang around a cemetery on a boiling hot summer day. First they had been delayed in traffic coming through the city, and then they had arrived at the orphanage to find Noah missing. The orphanage woman who met them offered to get him, but her father had to volunteer Kate. When the woman said he was bound to be at the cemetery, her father had given her mother a pointed look.
Noah was a weird kid all right. She hadn’t even noticed him the first time they brought her to Glastenbury, until her mother had pointed him out. Of course, Kate hadn’t paid too much attention, hardly believing they would really adopt someone.
Adoption had been her father’s idea to help her mother get over having a baby who was born dead, and not being able to have any more children. Funny how they reversed positions after one visit. Suddenly her mother was keen on adopting and her father wanted them to wait. That was because of who her mother wanted to adopt. They hadn’t been able to meet Noah straight off because of raising false hopes in him, but they had gone to look over the merchandise a couple of times.
‘He looks like an albino,’ her father had murmured in the car on the way home. Kate pretended to be asleep so they would go on talking. ‘I might have known you would choose the sickest looking kid there. You always choose the runt of the litter at the pound!’
There were lots of visits after that. On one, they had spoken to some psychiatrist. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him physically,’ her mother had said afterwards in a low tense voice, peeling potatoes. In the hallway, Kate had stopped to listen. Eavesdropping was the only way to get uncensored information.
Her father had been boning a fish. ‘You heard the psychiatrist. He’s mentally disturbed. It’s probably some kind of hereditary thing.’
‘He’s not crazy.’
‘I didn’t say he was crazy. Don’t be so defensive. You’re obviously far too emotional to make a sensible judgment over this. Why can’t you pick an ordinary kid?’
‘I don’t want an ordinary kid,’ her mother had said angrily. ‘And I can’t see that fantasising he was found in a basket makes Noah crazy.’
‘He thinks he’s some sort of wizard or something,’ her father had spluttered. ‘He thinks he’s got special powers!’
‘Shh, Katie will hear. Jack, he’s a lonely little boy who daydreams and imagines he’s special. What’s so terrible about that? He’s got a good imagination and he reads a lot. Maybe he’s finding it a bit hard to separate what’s real from the stories, but we can fix that.’
Her father said flatly, ‘Is that what this is all about? He’s sick and you think you can cure him?’
‘Jack, if anything, I think he can cure me.’
That seemed to be that and the adoption went ahead. They told Kate a watered-down version of Noah’s daydreaming, though they did condescend to tell her Noah had made up a name for her: Katlyn darkhair. She liked the sound of that.
Her eyes were drawn by the medieval-looking water tower in the paddock, its shadow falling right over the cemetery.
As she approached the gates, a gang of scruffy-looking kids came hurtling through into the street. The heat seemed more intense once she was inside and Kate squinted against the sun. At once, she spotted someone towering above the graves over to one side, near a stone crypt.
She frowned and blinked in astonishment, then she realised she was only looking at Noah who was standing up on top of a grave. She shook her head, thinking the sun must be getting to her, or the cemetery. For a minute she would have sworn she saw a tall, darkly dressed man with flowing blond hair right where Noah was.
She hurried over to where he was now squatting, staring at the headstone above the cracked grave slab.
‘Anyone you know?’ she quipped.
Noah turned quickly, his face tense as if he were expecting someone else. Then he smiled.
It was the sweetest smile Kate had ever seen in her life on a human being, and all the smart-alec jokes flew out of her head.
‘Hullo,’ Noah said, an echo of the smile in his voice. ‘Are we leaving now?’
Katlyn darkhair nodded.
THE PHOENIX
‘Princess Ragnar?’
Ragnar turned to William and tried to smile, but her hatred was so great that it would allow no other emotion. She did not feel it as heat but as a bitter burning cold flowing through her, freezing her to ice, to stone. Driven by such a rage, a princess might unleash her armies and destroy an entire city to the last person. She might command the end of a world.
‘Princess? Are you cold?’
She barely heard William’s words, but when she shook her head, before he turned away to keep watch for Torvald, she saw in his pale-green eyes the same blaze of devotion that had flared three summers past when he had pledged himself to her.
Her mind threw up an image of him making that pledge, the words as formal as the words from an old Bible.
‘Princess, I, William, am sent by the Gods to serve and guard you in this strange shadowland, until we are shown the way home by such signs and portents as I am trained to recognise. I pledge my life to you.’
Twelve years old, with one slightly turned eye, a broken front tooth, ripped shorts and a too-large cast-off T-shirt advising the world to ‘Be happy’, and here he was pledging his life to her.
He had a collection of T-shirts abandoned by the drug addicts and drunks who came to stay at Goodhaven to dry out. The weird thing was that those T-shirts always seemed to have something pertinent to say about what was happening when he wore them, and in the end, she came to see them as signs, just as William saw as signs a certain bird flying overhead, or a particular rock resting against another.
Hearing his absurd pledge, she had experienced a fleeting instinct to laugh out of nervousness or incredulity. That would have changed everything. Life could be like that sometimes – hinging on one tiny l
ittle thing or other. But she hadn’t laughed because underneath the urchin dirt and crazy talk, she had seen a reflection of her own aching loneliness.
‘Are you sure you have the right person?’ she had said, instead of, ‘Are you crazy?’ But it was close. They even started with the same words.
‘You are Princess Ragnar,’ he had said.
Those words sent a shiver up her spine, even after so much time. Because she had never seen him before. Then there was how he said her name – as if he was handling something infinitely precious. No one had said it like that before in her whole life except maybe her mother, though perhaps that was just a memory born of wishful thinking.
‘How do you know my name?’ she had demanded.
He had grinned, flashing the chipped tooth that she later learned had been broken when he’d happened on a drying-out drunk who had managed to drink a whole cupboard-full of cough medicine. The Goodhaven people stocked up on everything because they thought the world was going to end any day now and they wanted to be prepared. Though how a hundred tins of baked beans and a cupboard full of cough medicine was supposed to help you survive the end of the world was beyond Ragnar. The drunk’s back-handed slap had left William with the chip in his tooth that his aunt called God’s will. In fact, that was what William had told her when she’d asked what had happened to his front tooth.
‘It was God’s will.’ As if God had slapped him one.
The chip was wide enough to make him talk with a lisp, but since he could still use his teeth, fixing it would have been cosmetic and his aunt and uncle eschewed worldly vanity, believing it to be one of the things that brought most of the human debris they called Poor Lost Souls to Goodhaven in the first place.
Besides that, William was simple and it would hardly matter to the poor addled child that he had a chipped tooth when his brain was all but cracked clear through.
Those words came to her in William’s mimicked version of his aunt’s high-pitched folksy voice. That was how she explained him away to occasional government visitors and fundraising groups concerned about a child being exposed to the sort of people who came to Goodhaven.
‘Oh, he has seen much worse than anything he could ever see here,’ William had mimicked his aunt. ‘Why, his brain cracked under the pressure of seeing his mother and father murdered before his very eyes. He was there all alone a good two years before someone found him wandering around mad as a hatter.’
William had been looked after by the same people who had murdered his parents, though no one could figure out why they would bother. Maybe it was because he was so young. He was four when his relatives had agreed to take him on.
He was no simpleton. Ragnar had seen that right off, but he was sure as heck one strange piece of toast, and no wonder. Seeing your parents murdered would be enough to make anyone a little crazy.
Of course, she had known nothing at all about that the first time they’d met.
She had been swimming and had come out of the water wearing nothing but her long red hair. There was never anyone around during the week and she had been pretending to be the mermaid; trying to make up her mind whether the love of a prince would be worth the loss of her voice and the feeling that she was standing on knives every time she took a step. Especially when her father said love did not last, or else why had her mother run off and left them?
She was trying to figure out where she had left her clothes when William walked out carrying them. He had his eyes on her face and he did not once let them drop. He just held out her clothes and she snatched them up and pulled on jeans and a sloppy paint-stained windcheater, her face flaming.
Then he had suddenly fallen to his knees.
Her embarrassment evaporated since she was clothed now and anyway the boy clearly had no prurient interest in her nakedness.
She put her hands on her hips. ‘Who the heck are you?’
‘The gods have seen that you are lonely, Ragnar, and so I was sent to be your companion.’
Anything she would have said was obliterated by astonishment. For she was lonely beyond imagining. Her father had forbidden her to let anyone at her school know they were living illegally in the boathouse, which made it easier to have no friends than to make up believable lies. They had been squatting since the owner had moved to America, having told her father he could use the boathouse for his dinghy if he kept an eye on it. Her father took the dinghy out maybe three times a year and she was always convinced he would drown because he never took any of the things you were supposed to take like flares or lifejackets. He didn’t have to fish since his Sickness Benefit paid for food and cask wine. He worried her sick when he went out, and she could never understand why he did it. It wasn’t even as if he ever caught anything big enough to be legal or good eating.
Once, while they were keeping vigil for his return, William told Ragnar matter-of-factly that her father fished because he remembered when he had been a real fisherman.
‘He was never a real fisherman,’ Ragnar snorted. ‘He was some sort of mechanic.’
‘In his past life he was a fisherman and he slept with one of the goddesses. She took you away with her, but because you were part human, the gods made her send you here. As a punishment to her because she broke the rules.’
‘Seems to me the gods and goddesses do nothing but break rules. Look at Prometheus and Pandora.’
‘They are lesser gods,’ William had said with a lofty kind of pride. ‘My princess comes from an older and greater race of gods. And if he was not a fisherman once, then why does your father fish?’
As usual his habit of suddenly circling and darting back on an argument left her gasping like a fish out of water. The thing was she did not know why her father had brought them here to this spit of flat sand between an industrial wasteland and a whole lot of salt pans and wetlands. Nor why he fished.
Ragnar had known no other life. Not really. She sometimes remembered a mother who did not seem to have much to do with the mother her father muttered and cursed about. William had an answer for that as well. He thought that she was remembering not her mother in this life, but the goddess mother of her other life.
‘Then how come my father remembers me being born?’
‘The gods can make anyone remember or forget. They made your father remember his wife having a child – and maybe she did have a baby.’ His eyes flashed as he warmed to this theme. ‘Maybe she took their real child with her and the gods just stepped in and put you here, so he would think she left his baby. So he would take care of you and keep you out of the eye of the world.’
William was as worried about the eye of the world as her father. William, because of his uncle and aunt’s fear of negative publicity that might affect Goodhaven’s funding sources, and her father because he did not want to be thrown out of the boathouse, or have Social Security people poking around. Sending her to school worried him because if he didn’t They would be after him – They being the Government – but if he did, people would find out where they were living. He had solved the problem by sending her to school, but telling her that if anyone figured out where she lived, she would be taken away to an orphanage and locked up. That had frightened her so much she said so little at school that people thought there was something wrong with her. Fortunately integration policies, and her own consistently normal marks, kept them from trying to send Ragnar to a special school of the sort William told such horror stories about. His relatives had tried a whole lot of schools before he had managed to convince them he was too far gone for school.
‘I like people thinking I’m crazy. It’s easier and I know what I am inside so what they think doesn’t matter.’
Of course as she grew older, Ragnar’s fear of the authorities was diluted to wary caution, but her father sealed her silence. He said they would never allow her to take Greedy away with them.
Greedy was a crippled seagull William had rescued and given to her as a gift, saying that in the realm of the gods, the seagull was her perso
nal hawk. It was so devoted, William told her solemnly, that it had followed her to this world, but in order to come to her the gods offered the proud hawk only the form of a lowly scavenger. He told her the hawk’s real name was Thorn, but secretly she nicknamed it Greedy, because it was.
‘Thorn is hungry because in his previous life he was starved by the gods to try to make him forswear his allegiance to you,’ William had told her reproachfully the one time he heard her calling the bird Greedy.
William had an answer for everything. Truth was, he was a lot smarter than most of the kids and the teachers at school, at least in ways that mattered. He did not read, but he could tell stories better than any book, and he had built around the two of them a fantasy that was far more wonderful than life could ever offer. In the years since they had first met, he had been her companion and everything else she had wanted – slave, brother, confidant, friend. He had shed blood to seal his pledge though she had not wanted or asked for it, and he had promised to serve and obey, honour and protect her – with his own life if necessary.
He had watched her for a long time to make sure she was truly the one, he told her earnestly one time as they were baking mussels in a battered tin pot of salty water on a small fire. The water had to be salty or the crustaceans tasted vile.
‘But how did you know in the end?’
He shrugged. ‘I found a sign and I knew – a ring of dead jellyfish on the beach in the shape of a crown.’
It was easier to obey William’s odd instructions than to try to understand why he thought a toilet brush in seaweed was a warning that you were being discussed, or how walking a certain way round an overturned shell could avert an accident. It was very rare that he wanted her to do anything troublesome, though once when he said they must walk along the railway lines for so many paces, she worried a lot because, if they were caught, they would end up in the children’s court. But they had done it and William claimed that was what had stopped a council van coming down to Cheetham Point to check out rumours of people living there.
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