‘Ignore them,’ he said grimly. But when he saw the scratch on my cheek he pulled me to him and licked it clean. I winced; though his tongue was gentle, the intimate gesture was far too primitive for comfort.
‘That isn’t healthy,’ I protested.
‘Healthy?’ He laughed suddenly. ‘No, you’re right. Magic isn’t healthy. Not in any way. It’s categorically no good for you at all.’
‘Why’d you bother then?’ I asked as he hauled us off again, splashing and stumbling. ‘If it does you no good?’
‘Why bother with magic? At bottom it’s about not being under anyone or anything’s control – freedom of will. It’s not about power as most people assume. Actually most people assume that it’s about dressing up and getting your rocks off in a magic circle which, I admit, is something that may have influenced my own entry into the art.’ He spared me a wry glance over his shoulder. ‘But it’s really about attaining freedom from coercion of any kind: other people, circumstances, the laws of nature and of physics. And when you’ve attained all that, when no one and nothing can bring you into submission, then you have true freedom. And then you realise that the coercion that comes from within, from your own pride and ego, your drives and instincts and beliefs and habits, are a thousand times more tyrannical than any outside agent, so you shed those. And then …’ He stopped, frowning.
‘Then?’
‘Then you have perfect will. And you are capable of anything, except that you no longer need or desire to do it. In many ways there’s no longer any “you”. That’s the paradox.’ He shot me another glance. ‘I’ve never known anyone get that far. But that’s the theory. We’re here, by the way.’
I followed the direction of his nod and realised that the darkness ahead was not the gloom of infinitely receding woodland but a wall of yew trees, their foliage so dark that it looked black. ‘Yews shouldn’t grow in boggy conditions,’ I said, then felt stupid.
Ash squeezed my hand. ‘Come on.’
He led me up to the wall. The yews in fact were rooted on a circular bank. We ducked beneath a branch and crawled into the space they enclosed. The first thing I noticed was that the ground inside was firm and mossy and the yews formed such a dense wall that they cut out all the daylight except for a circular patch over the centre of the clearing. My eyes went up to that, thirsty for a glimpse of the sky. Only then did I look about me for the thing we’d come all this way to see.
It was a tree. The moment my eyes fell upon it I recognised it, because every fibre in my body recoiled like I’d just received an electric shock. It was the stump of a huge oak, covered in green and black mosses, and though it still stood higher than my head there wasn’t a leaf on it. Great fissures had rent the bole. The only things holding even the remnant of that trunk together as a whole were two metal bands that circled its girth, and they were green and eaten away with corrosion.
All around the stump fluttered velvety-black butterflies.
‘That’s it,’ I stammered. The hair was crawling on my neck. This tree was unlike anything else I’d seen in my life. It seemed to radiate a palpable energy and I could feel it throbbing at my fingertips and catching at my pulse. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it was incredibly intrusive. I shut my eyes, then squealed and jumped back. Ash grabbed me before I could crash into a yew branch. ‘You can see it with your eyes shut!’ I cried.
‘Oh, I know.’
You could see it better with your eyes shut. Eyes open, it looked like an impressive woodland relic. Eyes shut and it stood out like a great black tower, outlined by crawling red worms of fire which reached out to the yews all around and into the ground and towards us. And the biggest cleft in the trunk glowed with a ruddy light like a furnace. It sent all my smug everyday conceptions into a flat spin. ‘Is it … evil?’
The question seemed to puzzle Ash. ‘Evil? I don’t think so. How does it make you feel?’
I decided to keep my eyes open, because that was far less disconcerting. For a moment I just stood, sensing that energy surging in my belly. ‘Horny,’ I admitted.
‘Hah. You try living in the wood.’
‘But not just horny the usual way.’ I gulped. ‘It’s like … like everything outside me suddenly matters. The trees, the rocks, the clouds up there. It all turns me on. They’re filled with excitement. It’s like I’m seeing them for the first time. It’s like I could shag them all. The whole world.’ I didn’t dare look at Ash as I spoke.
‘Oh yes.’
‘What the hell is this thing?’
He was reluctant to answer. ‘Is it what you were expecting?’
I shook my head.
‘Go on: what did you picture while you were walking?’
‘I don’t know – a grave, I guess. Or, like, a sword in a stone. Something like that.’
Ash laughed, and I risked a glance at him. ‘Not bad, Avril. Not bad at all, though the sword got thrown into Dozmary Pool up on Bodmin Moor.’
‘So what is it?’
‘This? This is Merlin.’
I scrunched up my face. ‘Merlin? Like in King Arthur?’
‘That’s the one.’
The only picture I could associate with the words was of a cartoon wizard bumbling about with an owl. I think the stump was affecting my ability to think straight. ‘He’s a tree?’
‘He was imprisoned in a tree – an oak – in the centre of one of the last patches of primary forest in Britain. Just too late to stop him doing something unspeakable and just in time to stop him doing something that would change the course of history.’
‘I don’t get it.’ I couldn’t remember what had happened to Merlin in the stories; he’d just faded out of the Arthur legend, as far as I could recall.
Ash took a deeper breath. ‘You have to go back to the fifth century when it all happened. The Roman Legions had pulled out of Britain leaving it at the mercy of Saxon invaders, who were pushing westwards from their footholds in the east of the country. The British – partly Romanised, partly Christianised – were desperately struggling to hang on to their land and the civilisation they believed was their birthright. Arthur was a military commander who for some time managed to hold the whole sorry mess together, but he was only a diversion as far as Merlin was concerned, a holding pattern. Merlin had a plan. Merlin was going to make himself into an unstoppable weapon and he was going to wipe the Saxons off the face of the earth.’
‘How?’
‘He was a great magus and, unlike Arthur, no Christian. He worked a binding ritual. He travelled about the country and every time he found a source of power – a god, a gateway, a sacred item – then he would … consume it. He ate Cernunnos and Epona, Coventina and Andraste and Cocidius and Nodens of the Silver Hand. He ate twelve of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, and nearly destroyed Arthur’s fighting force, sending them searching after the last, the Cauldron of Annwn, though they found it too late. He ate the little deities of springs and mountains and trees, the water hags and the apple men, the sea serpents and the dragons and the spriggans, the merrows and the barghests, the trows and the ettins. Even the slivers of foreign gods brought in by soldiers and traders of the Empire – Isis and Mithras and Hercules and Serapis – adding all their power to his. He closed the gates of stone and of water to the underworld. It took him years, but he assumed all the power in the land into himself. He drained it dry of puissance and meaning. Well, the odd hob in a farmyard barn slipped beneath his notice, and he never lifted the water horse from Loch Ness, and some of the fay realms were sealed from him in time, as news of his quest spread. But very few escaped. He emptied the land and left only legends and tattered fragments in his wake.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘Ah. The Saxons caught wind of his plan, and they petitioned a sorceress called Nimue to stop him. She was a Briton, but she betrayed her people. She seduced Merlin, and she learnt his magic off him, and she imprisoned him in an oak by his own spells.’ Ash waved a hand at the stump. ‘This is the Gre
en Man.’
I flashed on sweet-smelling shops filled with crystals and peculiar pottery. ‘I thought that that was an old pagan god?’
‘New Age wishful thinking, Avril. The Green Man’s a Christian symbol. You see his effigy carved into the roof bosses of medieval churches: a man trapped in agony, branches bursting from his mouth and his flesh, a perpetual warning to those who’d dabble in devilish magics and give in to feminine wiles.’
‘Oh, that’s right, blame the woman.’ What was Ash’s problem with sex?
‘Who said anything about blame?’ He looked at me wonderingly and I felt a tinge of shame. ‘I doubt either of us would be standing here if it weren’t for Saxon bloodlines. And besides, whatever her motives, Nimue was right. No one man should have the sort of power Merlin had, under any circumstances and no matter what the cause. Can you imagine what sort of world he’d have wrought, given the time to do it?’
I stared into the depths of the rotting trunk. ‘Poor bastard.’
‘What?’
‘Fifteen hundred years in that … torture cell. Don’t you feel sorry for him? He was only trying to save his people.’
Ash frowned. ‘Sorry for him? No. Any part of Merlin that was human will be long dead by now. And he was only half-human to start with; they say his father was an incubus.’
‘Was he?’
‘A god, more likely. But believe me, whatever’s left in that oak now is not human. And it is extremely dangerous.’
I eyed the two corroded bronze bands dubiously. ‘Well, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it doesn’t look very well contained.’
‘Yes.’ Ash shook his head. ‘That’s the long-term problem. The binding is weakening. It’s not going to last forever. If I had the time or the energy I’d be panicking about that right now.’
‘But what happens if it breaks? Will he get out?’
‘Lots of things will, I imagine. All the gods and beasts and horrors he’s got locked away inside, they’ll all come out to play again. Remember that the land in Merlin’s time was a source of terror. Every lake and marsh and forest was a potential threat whose inhabitants had to be propitiated with sacrifices made in gold and in blood. But no one knows how to do that any more – and your average teenaged mother, living in a hutch on a sink estate and breeding like a rabbit while doped up on soap operas and antidepressants, isn’t going to have a clue what to do when Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones comes crawling out from under the bed to attack her offspring.’
‘Hey,’ I said pointedly, ‘my sister was a teenaged mum.’
He blinked hard. ‘No offence. I’m sure she’s a wonderful human being. It’s just that she wouldn’t really cope with the return of the Old Ways. Shorthand is, if he gets out lots of people will die. That’s just for starters. I can’t even guess what will happen after that.’
‘So you need to rebind Merlin.’
‘Nice idea. I’ll add it to my “To Do” list.’
I might have got mad at him except that I saw his shoulders sag and suddenly in those sharp hazel eyes I caught a glimpse of a bleakness that made me hurt in sympathy. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. I’m fine.’ He passed his hand over his face. ‘I’m just tired, Avril. I feel … trapped, like Merlin there. The fact is, I don’t know at the moment how to rebind him. I don’t even know how to stop Deverick, which is the immediate problem. It was pure luck that I got here ahead of him.’ He gestured around us. ‘Nimue never intended anyone to know what she’d done. It was only by chance that a passing knight stumbled on Merlin’s oak and heard his story. He could still speak then, apparently. Anyway, when Arthur died at Camlann there was a single knight – Bedwyr – who survived the battle. He threw the sword away. Then he chose to spend the rest of his days here guarding the wood and the wizard, the last link to his king. His children and descendants followed in the task, and somewhere along the line they put an enchantment about the estate so that if you knew what it was you were looking for you couldn’t find it. Magi have searched for years for this spot, and no one’s ever succeeded.’
‘Until you.’
‘I wasn’t looking for it. I knew Deverick was searching for something in the West Country, but not what it was. I was just nosing about. And … I worked out what sort of area it was likely to be in. You see, Merlin’s started to leak.’
‘Leak …?’
‘That’s why the fay are all over this place. I think the odd thing has slipped out occasionally over the centuries, but about sixty years ago the binding really weakened and things began to leak out much faster. The brood of Bastet were among the first: big cats not real enough to be caught but real enough to leave tracks and kill sheep. There’ve been lights in the sky since the 50s – not visitors from other earths but from this one; hinkypunks are what they used to call them. Morgawr shows up off the Cornish coast. Mowing devils infest the ripening wheat. Even some of the old gods, in a small way, are making a return to the nation’s consciousness. We’re becoming heathen again.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘So much strangeness, and so much of it concentrated in the West Country. I put in a lot of legwork and, eventually, I stumbled across this place. I wasn’t exactly welcomed, and in the circumstances you can see why. The sitting guardian was an old man by then, but he had a son in Canada and a younger daughter with two grandchildren in Nantes. The succession should have been assured.’
‘It wasn’t, I assume.’ From nowhere a shiver worked its way up my back and I felt my nipples tighten in sympathy.
‘John Kester died of a heart attack. Inside two months his son developed a brain tumour. The three in France were wiped out by a motor accident on the way to the airport, having received the diagnosis.’
I ran my tongue across my lips. ‘You think Michael Deverick did it?’
‘I think those sorts of accidents are relatively easy to arrange once you know your target. The line of Bedwyr was broken, leaving no heir. The estate was intended, in case of such an emergency, to pass into the hands of a trust, but what with multiple death duties …’ He shrugged. ‘There was considerable legal wrangling and large sums of money changed hands, I understand. But he got it in the end. And with the breaking of the family line the magical misdirection failed. I was the only one who knew. I had to do something to stop him.’
I looked at my feet. The suggestion that Michael had been directly responsible for several murders wasn’t comfortable. ‘What will he do if he gets hold of it, then?’
‘Its power is tied to the earth and the natural cycles. If Deverick could bind Merlin to his will and command that power, then he’d be able to, oh, I don’t know … find new oil caches underground, make changes to the weather, raise up new diseases. I’m no economist, but I know scarcity raises prices. Wipe out the coffee harvest in Ethiopia, say, and you push up profits elsewhere. He could do that. He could do pretty much anything he wanted. He could hold nations to ransom.’
‘Christ.’ I shifted uneasily in my too-big clothes. ‘So what can I do?’
‘Well. You can keep your eyes open for me. If Deverick’s going to bind Merlin he’ll need two things. He’s got them already, I suspect. The first is a receptacle of some sort; he’s not going to leave the source of his power in the middle of some wet woodland in the arse-end of England. He’ll want to move Merlin. So he needs an object to carry him in. The second thing he must have is Merlin’s grimoire.’
‘That’s a spell book, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. All the legends say that Nimue bound Merlin with his own spells. If that was the case then why couldn’t he break himself free? No. She used his grimoire and the spells within as a focus, as the key that locks the chains. The binding can’t be broken without it, so if Deverick’s making a move then he must have the book – somewhere. I don’t know where. It’s not the sort of thing he’d trust to a bank vault, in fact I think he’d keep it by him nearly all the time. If I could get the book away from him –’ his eyes glinted ‘– it would change everything.’
‘No. No, he won’t. Magic is the occult art, Avril. It has to be hidden. Things gain their power by having intense private meaning, by being unique and personal. It’s … It’s like sex. What you do in private is wonderful; do it in front of twenty people and it becomes undignified and open to criticism; do it in front of a TV audience and you’re a laughing stock. The very worst thing you can do with a real grimoire is turn it into a mass-market paperback with a pentacle on the cover – all the power is lost. Deverick won’t have scanned or copied Merlin’s book; he won’t even have had it translated. He’ll have to work from the original.’
I bit my lip and rubbed a hand up and down my arm. The outwash of power was making a pulse throb in my inner thigh. ‘What does it look like?’
‘It’ll be in Latin I’d imagine, given its age, and written on parchment not paper. It might be a scroll, or a scroll cut down to look like a book.’
‘Well, I could look for it,’ I said doubtfully. ‘It’s not easy to get into the house, if that’s what you’re thinking – that’s builders only and they’re there right till nightfall every day.’
‘Well, don’t try it after dark. Deverick’s put a guardian on the Grange.’
‘A guardian?’
‘It looks like a big black dog … at least from a distance. Stay away.’
‘Fine. I’ll just keep my eyes open.’ Maybe one of the builders would give me a tour of the Grange, I speculated.
‘If you do see it, don’t touch it. Deverick will have put wards on the book. It could be lethal.’
I bristled at his overprotectiveness. ‘OK, OK. Do you want my help or not?’
Ash put his hands on my shoulders. ‘I want it very much.’ His words hung in the air for a moment as his gaze held mine. Then, reluctantly, he pulled away. ‘Um. I think we should leave.’
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