by Sarah Rayne
Did she dare? Joanna stood watching the light, uncertain, trying to summon up the courage. “Never build on Glowing Lands,” said the old warning. Most people would not even walk on them.
But I expect people do cross them, Joanna thought now. I expect they do. It was not in human nature not to go where you were forbidden. It was certainly not in human nature to leave places unexplored. The Letheans had been great explorers, they had known every corner of the world … And the Letheans had died, said a small warning voice in her head.
I don’t care, said Joanna defiantly. This is the safest place for me to be, and I don’t think anything very terrible is going to happen to me. I don’t think anything is going to happen to me at all, really. I shall just be here, and I shan’t look at anything. I shall just be quietly hiding, I might even fall asleep. There had been little sleep to be had during the night … Oh Flynn, Flynn, please don’t come after me. Not yet.
The edges of the Glowing Lands were not so very different from anywhere else to begin with. Joanna’s confidence rose. It was all a pretence, a nothing. Perhaps there had once been something here; perhaps after Devastation there had been something very terrible indeed. Perhaps — this was rather a dreadful thought, but — perhaps the Apocalypse had not vanished from the world, but had stayed behind, lurking and skulking in a patch of Glowing Land. Joanna did not really believe this, and she certainly did not believe it now, standing here summoning up courage to step on to the Lands. But it would account for all the stories, and it would certainly account for all the old warnings. But now, the Lands would be like everywhere else. Of course they are, thought Joanna, taking the first step out.
And with the first few steps her confidence came back. Nothing happened. There was no growling sound, no flashing light. Fairy-tale nonsense, said Joanna, remembering her father’s words.
Even so, it was curious that the nearer she got to the centre of the light, the stranger she began to feel. She thought she could hear sounds and then she thought there was a soft rich scent. But she could not be sure of any of it.
The sound was like nothing she had ever heard in the whole of her life. Sweet and soft and rather cold. The louder it got, the nearer she got to it, the colder it became. Something from the bottom of the ocean, or from the other side of the sky. Something that might crawl out from beneath the caves and tap at your windows in the night. Icicle-fingers on glass. Joanna was dreadfully afraid, but she could not resist …
A beckoning. Come to us Joanna … come through the Time Curtain … we are fishers of souls, Joanna, and we will take you to worlds you did not dream existed …
Joanna stood stock-still at the centre of the light, and thought she was surely going mad.
There was a ripple of amusement. Not mad, not mad, let her not be mad, sweet heaven keep her sane … A thousand voices pressed in on her. We can quote your poets, Joanna. They died before your world began, but still we can quote them … Come into the music, Joanna … we are fishers of souls and we will gather up your soul for our master …
The most extraordinary part about the whole thing was how safe she felt. How secure and warm. As if, after a long journey, a wearisome journey of a thousand years, she was coming home. This is where I belong. In here, in the music, in the steady glow of the Light, in the rich warm scent. I know this place.
Of course you know it, Joanna … it is the end of all journeying and the beginning of delight … you belong here, as you always belonged … COME NEARER, JOANNA …
Joanna took a few hesitant steps forward. She thought: of course, none of this is happening. I have fallen asleep — yes, that is it. I have fallen asleep on Tara’s Hill, and I am dreaming all of this … Quite soon I shall awake …
Awake and find you here upon the cold hillside …
There was a deeper light ahead of her, and Joanna had the sense of thin green and blue arms reaching out to draw her towards them. She thought: of course, I am not believing any of this; even so, it is all very curious. But I am not really experiencing any of it.
Oh yes you are, Human Child, oh yes you are …
Beyond the light was a mist, and beyond that the shapes of trees and mountains. The blue and green, misty island … I am coming home, thought Joanna, and something triumphant rose up inside her. There are other worlds, and I am about to see one. There are creatures of mist and magic and wild woodland blood, and I am about to meet them.
And if a man should dream and go to Paradise, and pluck there a rose … and if, on waking, he should find himself still possessed of that rose — what then? Come into the light, Human Child, and we will show you wonders that your poor bleak world never dreamed existed …
Pluck the rose?
And wake finding you are still possessed of it … And what then, Human Child …
I suppose, thought Joanna, that it will be all right. After all, I can always come back.
*
Flynn stood in the farmhouse kitchen and broke eggs on to the stove for breakfast, began to slice bread. His mind and his heart were warm, still upstairs in bed with Joanna, and he was intensely happy. He had half woken when she slipped from his bed, and then had drifted back into sleep, lulled by the warmth of the bed and the lingering scent of her that still was with him. He had vaguely thought that she must have gone out for a breath of early morning air. He had certainly not thought any more than that.
For I will never let you go, my love …
He smiled as he set the table and put out the earthenware mugs for the milk they would drink with breakfast. The Letheans had drunk steaming beverages; beans that you ground up and steeped in boiling water and which had a scent so strong and so sweet that it had embodied the essences of the hot far-off lands where they grew. And there had been some kind of plant as well, dried and seasoned in some way, that was served from a spouted utensil and taken with milk or lemon. Flynn thought he would have enjoyed both, but the secrets were lost like so much else. They drank milk at breakfast and at the midday meal. In the evenings there was often poteen or homemade wine from the apples and plums in the orchard; if the weather was particularly cold they heated the wine and sweetened it with honey. Once or twice, he had tasted a strong, distilled drink called brandy — it had been like drinking liquid fire — but there was only a very small supply of it left in the world, and it was believed that it took a very long time to mature and that even then it was enormously expensive to produce.
He stood for a moment longer, enjoying the sunshine that was pouring in, making the dish of honey transparent and warming the old pearwood chest that stood by the window and always soaked up the sun, so that by the afternoon you could smell the fragrant wood and the beeswax that generations of Flynn’s ancestors had used to polish it.
Probably Joanna would appear at any moment. Flynn smiled at the thought. They would eat breakfast together, just the two of them, for his father would still be outside somewhere, and in any case, he would understand at once what had happened and he would be tactful. Flynn stood in the warm sunlit kitchen and all the years ahead when he and Joanna would eat breakfast here stretched out before him, and all the mornings when they would smile at one another over this table rose up to delight him. They would each have their own chair, and there would be warm honey, just as there was today, and fresh bread and butter from the churn, and they would discuss the day’s plans, happy and peaceful and at home. A feeling of deep contentment settled over him as he opened the pantry door to fetch the milk from the settle.
As Flynn read Joanna’s note, he experienced a sudden cold hollowness, as if something inside him had fallen down a huge bottomless hole.
Nothing had changed and everything had changed.
An image of Joanna came strongly into his mind, so that he saw her with swift startling clarity. Joanna, with her cloudy dark hair and her wide-apart eyes and her little pointed face that a man would ache to take between his hands and kiss until solemnity dissolved.
I shall never want to leave you …
And I shall never let you go, my love …
And with the coming of the day she had gone, running into hiding to protect him.
Flynn knew at once where she had gone. He did not know how he knew it, but he did know. Some kind of link between them, was it? Better to say nothing of it in any case. Mutants were looked at askance; they were outlawed and sent to live in the grim grey building on the edge of Tugaim. They were made comfortable enough, but they were not allowed to mingle with people who were normal. They were certainly not allowed to conjoin or even, Flynn believed, to form ordinary friendships. They were looked on as freaks, and it was considered very shameful indeed to have a Mutant born into your family. How would people view it if it was known that an O’Connor was so far from being ordinary that he knew about events before they happened, or that he could pick up the feelings and the fears of people he was close to? Flynn thought he was very close to Joanna now, but he thought that such a power — could you call it a power? — would be looked at strangely, and so he had always kept silent about it. Had his father guessed? Yes, probably. Quite often, Flynn had found Michael looking at him in a strange intent way; quite often, Michael himself had known what Flynn was thinking, or what he was going to say before he said it. Some kind of sharing gift? Best to say nothing anyway.
After what had been between him and Joanna last night he thought he could feel her thoughts and her emotions very clearly indeed. And oh my love, my love, you are in some terrible danger, and I must somehow save you.
For a few minutes he pretended that it was only a physical danger, even though it sent his mind into agony to think of Joanna lying injured somehow, crying from the pain of a splintered bone, unable to crawl for help. It was perfectly possible, of course.
But it was not like that. Flynn did not know how he knew — only that you could not be hurt, my darling girl, and I not suffer with you — but he did know it.
Joanna had gone to the Glowing Lands so that she would be safe from her father and Brian Muldooney. She would be at the centre of the light now, Flynn knew this quite definitely, and unless they were very quick she would have gone, or been taken, through the Time Curtain.
And the Lands are dimming, and the Curtain is re-sealing itself, and once beyond Time it is not always possible to return …
That was the agony now, and Flynn flinched.
But if Joanna had truly gone through the Time Curtain, then there was only one thing to be done.
He would have to go in after her.
The idea of following Joanna, of doing the absolutely forbidden thing, the thing that his ancestors had warned against for several generations, did not strike into him the terror it ought to have done. There was a tremendous excitement: a feeling of awe, a feeling of at last I shall see and at last I shall know!
The Glowing Lands were quiet when he reached them; they were quiescent and bland, and they were not in the least sinister or threatening. But Flynn knew them; he knew that they were neither quiescent nor bland. They could change in a breathspace, they could become strong and awesome and they could beckon. Had they beckoned to Joanna? Had she in her headlong flight from Muldooney stumbled into their centre, and had she heard that other-world music, cold and distant, and been tempted, or taken, through the Time Curtain?
Flynn stood irresolute on the boundaries, watching the soft light, thinking that the stories were true at least, the Lands were dimming, they were dying. Panic swept over him. Supposing he went in and could not get back. It was his old nightmare; the thought of being trapped in a far-off, long-forgotten land, unable to return to everything that was familiar and safe.
But then supposing he could not get through anyway? Suppose, just suppose, that the gap was closing, that it had closed already, that Joanna had somehow slipped through the final chink?
I won’t think about it, said Flynn. But he did think about it, he sat down on the ground and stared at the Lands, and thought about Joanna carried far beyond his reach, in some merciless half-human world. I must get her out, he thought. It can be done, surely. Others have gone through the Curtain. There is nothing whatsoever to be afraid of. My father said others have done it, and that is why we know so much about the deep past. Despite himself, he felt his senses stir at the thought of seeing that ancient lost Ireland, the world he had so often heard about and dreamed about.
At last he moved forward, feeling the ground warm beneath him. He thought there was a soft thrumming in the air, and then he was not so sure. He certainly thought there was an echo of the music he had heard on the night he met the Keepers, but he was not certain about that either. It was like something heard from a long way off; an echo down a long dark tunnel, the briefest of glimpses of dark forests and mist-shrouded plains; the suspicion of creatures with long flowing hair and slanting eyes and beautiful cruel mouths.
He thought, I am missing something, I am here at the wrong moment, or else it is the right moment but the wrong place. Or I am saying the right words, all but one, or perhaps adding one that is not needed.
Oh open up to me, let me through; for if I lose Joanna I have lost everything!
There was a moment of silence so complete that for a second he thought he had succeeded. The air seemed to waver, and he thought he saw a huge silver blue sheet that stretched up and up, as far as he could see, and down into the core of the earth, and away on each side to all the horizons. The Time Curtain! He took a deep breath and waited. For an instant, the dark misty forest came a little more sharply into focus, and then it blurred and seemed to slip back. Flynn had the sensation of something infinitely precious and infinitely beautiful slipping through his grasp, and he could have wept. There were dreams in the forest, and there were moving figures and red eyes gleaming, and prowling creatures that sometimes went on all fours and sometimes walked upright like men.
And then there was nothing. He was alone, sitting on the damp grass, a little breathless, a little dazed, and the Glowing Lands were as they had always been.
Joanna was as far from him as ever.
*
Joanna had not been aware of passing through the silver-blue light, but she had seen, at the edge of her vision, an immense flare of something intangible as the Time Curtain parted and she was pulled through.
For a moment, she stood, unable to think or see, blinded by the flare, dazzled by the sight that met her eyes.
The blue and green, misty island … the Dark Forests of Flynn’s tales, and the extravagant vegetation of a world not yet scorched into arid barrenness by the Apocalypse’s anger. I have gone back, thought Joanna in awe. Somehow I have gone back to the deep past. I am not believing any of this, but still it is happening.
The music was still with her, but distantly, a little way off. As if — absurd thought that it was — but as if someone was playing a song and beckoning her to follow. Over the hills and far away … yes, and over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar … through flood and fire … there is a bank whereon the wild thyme blows … there dwells the Master … come farther in, Human Child …
Joanna thought: is this the world of all the stories? Has someone — something? — taken me back? Or will I awake and find me here upon the cold hillside … And if he should awake and find himself still possessed of the rose … Where had those words come from?
From out of the past, Human Child, and from out of the future for past and future are all one to those who come through the Time Curtain …
Joanna turned in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing. I am alone in an alien world, I am alone in the past, and I have escaped from Muldooney more completely than I hoped was possible.
She was very much afraid, but she was a child of the New World, of the devastated world brought to near ruin by mankind’s folly and greed, and she had had to work and struggle. In her veins ran the blood of the men and women who had survived a disaster greater than had ever been envisaged by anyone at any time: she was a survivor.
I am afraid, thought J
oanna, but at least I can pretend not to be. Pretend and the pretence will become reality … Yes, that was a good maxim.
The music was still reaching out to her, and through the trees she began to make out shadowy figures. Flowing creatures of green and blue and silver, never quite still, never quite staying in one place, constantly changing and flowing with the music. Were they the music makers?
Yes we are, Human Child, we make the music of the world, we scoop up the rivers and the forests and the skies and turn them into music … And you must come with us, you must follow us, for there is no resisting the music … there is no fighting the music …
Long fingers, twined about with slender birch twigs beckoned to her, and here and there she caught the curve of a cheek, the fall of a curtain of hair. Creatures never fully seen. Beautiful but with something strange about them. Were these the half-human beings of the old stories?
We are not human at all, Joanna, we are the sidh, and in our veins runs the icy blood of the seas and of the worlds beyond the skies … But our music is the music that has lured Men to their fates ever since Time started, and perhaps before that … We are the sirens who sit on the rocks and we are the mermaids who draw sailors down to the worlds beneath the seas … We sat at the side of the Thracian poet Orpheus and gave him the power to call up the trees and the waters, and to play his magical lyre that has lived on in men’s memories … And we sat on the shoulder of the rat-catcher of Hamelin when he drew the rats from the City … Temptation we are and Desire … Sin we are and Lust … But we are beautiful, Human Child, and we serve our master, and there is no resisting us …
They were drawing her through the forest now, but so gently, so subtly, that she was barely aware of it. And yet, there were pine needles beneath her feet, thick as any carpet, and there were sounds overhead that would be birds, but no birds that she had ever heard. Beautiful, thought Joanna, afraid and excited and enchanted as she was.