“You’ll be safe here,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed it.
“That isn’t why I came,” she said. I looked back to see her eyes, a chilly gleam in the darkness.
“What do you mean?”
“I need something. Something that is down here.”
I stared at her. “There’s nothing here. You can see for yourself. No treasure, no gold.”
She gave a shrill little laugh. “Oh yes, you are a man, no mistaking that. Even your mad head is filled with metal, just like all the rest. I’m not looking for gold.”
“Then what are you looking for?”
“You will see, if it comes to it.”
I did not like the sound of this, but it barely mattered to me any more whether I lived or died. A thin voice at the back of my head told me that there were worse things than dying, but I did not want to listen to it. The cool ghost beside me was the only thing I cared about now. We went on.
I couldn’t keep track of time at the best of it, and if I could no longer see the sun or the moon, then I was wholly lost. I took the flint from my skins and struck a bundle of tinder.
“No light!” she said sharply. “Put it out.” So I did.
Her own faint gleam lit our way, but we were deep into the cavern, where water dripped and pooled, before she next spoke.
“He’s here.”
I turned to look at her. She had stopped in her tracks. Her face was beginning to lengthen, but then it flattened out once more, back to human.
“Who?”
“Mac Derga’s oak-man. I can feel him. He’s sent his spirit out to look for me.”
“Can his spirit find you, this far below the earth?”
“I do not know. He has allies, many of them. I hoped–” She grew still and trembled. I longed to protect her, but did not know how. Something was snuffling and grunting in the tunnel. Without a sound, the Changing fell apart into a series of water droplets and melted into a nearby pool. Her light was gone. I was alone in cauldron blackness. The grunting grew louder: something grumbling and angry. I blundered against the wall of the cavern, scraped my arm. I smelled blood, briefly, and then I ran.
It was not my thought to abandon her and escape. I hoped to draw the thing off, away from her. I was nothing, and she had become the light of the woods. And even in the dark, I knew the way. I had been down here before and the tunnel led only up and out, without branches. I ran along it as swiftly as I could, with the thing close behind me. I could smell it, too: a thick earth stink.
Teeth grazed my ankle, but I was out. The woods were waiting, still and cool, and there was a slice of new moon above the trees. The power of the oak-men is strongest when the moon is waxing, they grow together. I fell, rolling down a bank of earth, and the thing tumbled out behind me. I glimpsed it, briefly. It was a badger: huge-shouldered, claws outstretched. A gold torc glinted around its throat. And then it shimmered, Changing into a man.
Mac Derga’s oak-man was old, perhaps forty or more, a sinewy form covered in the blue. Old markings lined his arms and chest; he was naked. His hair was limed into spikes, black and white like the badger’s. I am not a small man, but he swept down on me and picked me up by the throat.
“Where is she?”
I did not care if he choked me. It was almost a relief that the end had come at last. I managed to say, “Where you will never find her,” and he dropped me.
“Then that is no place at all,” he spat. He raised his arms to the woods. “Rise! She is here.”
I thought at first he was talking to Mac Derga’s warriors, but it was the woods themselves that woke. He spoke their names, the secret ogham names that I had come to know through their own whispering: fearn, duir, nuin, tinne. He spoke to the male trees only, the chieftain trees, calling them up, and where they had stood, wood-warriors stood in their place. Holly men, straight as their spears, sharp toothed; alder men, with need-fire flickering around their wet skins; rowan men whose hair was tipped with blood. Their eyes were hollow. They stepped forward. Their spears were levelled at me and I did not close my eyes, but waited to die.
And then there was a voice behind me. The oak-man’s head snapped round and I saw a fierce exultation cross it. Whatever his plan had been, it had worked. The voice was hers and she spoke the name of the other trees: the women’s trees. Straif and quert and beth and huathe, blackthorn, apple, birch, haw – and they too rose from the wood and ran shrieking forward, to where the girl was standing.
“Deire!” the oak-man shouted, “See this, you bitch of a doe?” – and cast a glittering net from his hand. The Changing hissed and fell back, scrambling into the cave. The oak-man cursed and bolted after her: I followed them both, but a wood-warrior blocked my way. He was a holly man. His teeth glittered, even in the darkness. I discovered that I did, after all, care whether I lived or died. Behind me, I heard hisses and cries as the wood-warriors fell upon one another with the rustle of branches. I reached for the flint, nearly dropping it, and struck kindling. It was dry, the spark caught. I threw it. I saw the holly man’s mouth open in an O and then he was gone in a rush of flame. The wood-warriors cried out. Clutching the burning kindling, I went into the cave and a rush of wind sent the smoke after me.
I found them down by the pool. He was stalking her, and I wondered whether he wanted her for Mac Derga after all. I could see his erection, strong for an old man. She was merging and changing, too far away as yet for him to cast his net, but his power filled the little chamber. I rushed him. He was not expecting it, and we both fell to the floor. His hand flew out and I saw the sticky strands emerge from it, bloody as they left the skin. But he missed her. She gave a cry and a doe was standing there for a fleeting moment. Then she was back. She struck him about the head, but she was too small and slight to do much damage. And so was I, in my half-starved state. The oak-man rolled me over and hammered my head on the stone floor until the cave spun. His hands closed around my throat. I heard her shrieking, but I was choking, and, I saw dimly, so was he. The smoke from the burning kindling had drifted upward. The air was thick with it. My ears hummed, louder and louder, as the blood rose. I could think only of her. I beat at him, feebly, but it was no use. The humming grew and suddenly, with a great cry, he was off me. I hauled myself to my feet, faint with coughing.
The Changing was nowhere to be seen. The oak-man writhed on the cavern floor, beneath a crawling, moving mass of bees. Wondering, I looked up and saw the paper cone, high in the roof of the cave. The oak-man lay still. There was silence outside the cave. I watched, breathless, as bees became woman again. The clear cold place in my head was growing: no more humming, like the voice of bees. I felt the oak-man take my madness with him, as his spirit fled. She looked at me.
“Well?” she said. “And now?”
I was able to tell her, for I knew. “My name is Suibhne Gelt,” I said. “I am the son of Fergal Mac Maigen. I come from Dun Dubh Fort and the People of the Deer. I am your brother.” The bitch yawned in sunlight: her name meant Summer. My mother walked smiling around the fortress wall with a pail of milk. My sister stood before me, lately bees.
“It’s really you,” I said.
She nodded, smiling. “It’s really me. I knew I could get you back. I just needed the right form. Gnats and deer weren’t enough. I do not have the power to take a wolf’s shape. So it had to be something little and dangerous.”
“I remember him,” I said. I looked down at the motionless, bloated face of my enemy: Mac Derga’s high druid Coann, who had sought to kill my father’s only son and so take Dun Dubh. But he had not slain me, and my sister had come to take me home. I reached out and took her hand and led her from the cave, through the quiet morning wood, past holly and blackthorn thicket and the songs of birds, to the high land and home.
PARTY TRICKS
DAN ABNETT
Dan Abnett is a writing machine, producing vast amounts of work in many different genres and many different mediums. Unlike a machine, however, Mr Abnet
t has wit and soul and a quick and clever way with words, all of which he brings to his fiction. In the following tale Dan shows us the benefits of keeping our enemies close.
LOOKING BACK, QUITE frankly, it’s difficult to know what to make of it. It’s very hard to recall why things happened the way they happened. The PM always said he’d discuss it in his memoirs, but he never did. They say his mind was going by then, and he certainly didn’t seem to remember any details when I asked him about it. But the PM was a tough old bastard, and I honestly believe it was the Fleet Street hack he got to ghost the memoirs who decided to leave the whole thing out... For the sake of discretion, I’d imagine, or credibility. There are some places even Fleet Street hacks don’t like to go, if you can believe that.
Anyway, the point is, no one took to Rakely to begin with. No one liked him, or fancied his chances. He had no prospects. I can’t even remember the name of his first seat, but it was as safe as houses, and we’d kept it since William the bloody Conqueror. It would have taken an utter prick to lose it. He was just a warm body.
People who’d been up at Merton at the same time as Rakely never had much to say about him. He hadn’t made any lasting impression. It seemed so unlikely, one of them told me, that he’d choose to go into what was, essentially, the public service industry. It required charm to do that, because you needed people to like you enough to vote for you. It was a simple enough formula to grasp. You needed, at the very minimum, a decent facsimile of likeability.
Whatever the case, Rakely was a back bencher at the time. He was on a few subcommittees, nothing of note. Basically, he didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. This all began during the Henig-Duncans share scandal. That had just broken. Everyone’s attention had been on Europe, and the Health Bill, and no one had seen it coming. God, not even Rosmund, and he was the biggest scalp. They took him to the cleaners. I remember his face on television, at the Grandage Inquiry. He looked as though he’d been violated with a pineapple. I have never seen anyone appear so uncomfortable.
Suddenly, it was sheer shitstorm on all sides. Rosmund and the share thing was the big one, of course, but there was also Peters, and that idiot Doverson, and then that frankly astonishing business with Parkin and the schoolboy at the swimming baths. I don’t even know where to start with that. I swear to almighty God I never knew he was the sort. We were at Colet Court together, for god’s sake. He was a sound chap. I’d have put money on it.
Except, of course, it turned out he wasn’t.
Any one of those things, just Parkin alone, should have taken the Government down. I remember the Foreign Secretary suggesting at a Cabinet lunch that we should fall on our swords, let the Opposition in, and come back in four years when the dust had settled in the hope that the general public would have forgotten, or at least forgiven, our association with liars, cheats, insider traders and perverts.
Maybe it would have been better that way.
The first move, if we were going to strategise any kind of survival, was to replace Rosmund. The Party Chairman and the Chief Whip were both absolutely gunning for someone more capable than Rosmund, and Rosmund – hard though it is to admit in the wake of Henig-Duncans – had been damned good. He’d known how to work the Commons, and the party faithful. Not shares, so much, as it turned out.
So, their list pretty much started and finished with Forster. I mean, he was the only serious contender. We’d known for three or four years he was a party leader or deputy PM in waiting. One of the main reasons we hadn’t rolled him out earlier was simply to keep his nose clean for the succession we all knew was coming. The PM had a term left in his legs, at best. Forster was the coming man. And my godfathers, he was good. TV loved him, the constituency party loved him, and he regularly trumped forty-five or forty-six per cent approvals with working mums and job seekers, which made the PM shit actual blood with envy. None of that mattered really, though. What mattered, what I believed mattered, and what the rest of the Cabinet believed mattered, was that Forster was a real professional. He understood the way the House worked. He understood the process in some kind of uncanny, intuitive way. I’ve never seen horse trading done the way he did it. I’ve never seen cross-party work like it either. God, the Opposition benches adored him too. You know what it was? He was a statesman. He understood parliamentary craft.
The plan was, we’d bring him in from the Northern Ireland Office, probably swapping him out for Peters initially, get him placed as Special Advisor to Number 10, then do a whole re-shuffle at the start of the next session, which would leave him as Home Secretary by Christmas. He’d be the poster child for our mid-term rebranding. Clean, scandal-free.
I think I slept well the night we settled on that. Forster was on board. I went home, and tried to ignore the fact that every commentator on every channel was trying to burn us at the stake.
Then, as I remember, it was Billy Hutchins who rang me about Rakely. He wanted to have a conversation, that’s was what he said. I asked him to be a little more specific, and he said that he thought we, and by we he meant the PM, were being pretty hasty about running with Forster without considering Rakely.
Well, I can tell you I laughed at him. I think I even checked my calendar to make sure it wasn’t the start of April. Billy could be a bit of a wind-up merchant at times. But he was dead straight serious. I mean, bloody serious. That gave me pause. I’d known him long enough to recognise the tone.
We had a quiet lunch at Severay’s. It’s not there anymore, but it was a nice place. Quiet. I wanted to sound Billy out on the Q.T. before bringing the PM in. I suspected Billy might have been doing a little horse trading of his own, and I thought I could keep him sweet with a promise or two.
But he was actually on the up-and-up about Rakely. He said something mysterious about Forster not being the man we thought he was, which I poo-pooed, then he kept on about Rakely. I pointed out that Rakely wasn’t really very able, he wasn’t very senior, and he certainly wasn’t very popular. Billy said to me, “We don’t need someone good, Charles, not to replace Rosmund. We just need someone different. We just need someone who hasn’t got any baggage. Any blood on his hands.”
Well, I didn’t think Forster had, but he advised me to look into it, and to do a little due diligence on Rakely while I was about it.
I don’t know. There was something about it that stuck with me. I made an excuse to go and see Rakely at his office. I think I pretended to be sounding him out on the Health Bill. He wasn’t very much more charming than I remembered, but he had a way about him that I hadn’t seen before. It seemed as though he had a sharper political mind than I’d initially given him credit for. From the way he talked, entirely casually, I got the impression that he knew the deeper purpose of my visit. He understood what was at stake and what was on offer. He didn’t push it or anything, but he knew. And he was leaving it up to me to make the call.
I felt I had underestimated him. I took a look back through Hansard and the party record, and through his official papers, and there was nothing. Nothing good or remarkable, granted, but nothing even remotely controversial, let alone bad. He was as clean as Billy Hutchins said he was. He was a tabula rasa. Then I thought about Forster, and his slight dalliance with the left wing in his student days, and his constant, noble but rather exasperating stance on the nuclear issue. I mean to say, they were minor, minor things, just little sticks that the press could use on a rainy day to beat him, or us, with. Nothing significant in the long run, merely niggles.
But Rakely had nothing.
Rather to my surprise, I brought some people in on it: Tom Jeffers, Douglas Barney, Mark Broadbent from Defence, and Hardiman. You didn’t make a play like this without Alex Hardiman. We also talked to a few others, like Kinley and Sobers, to take their temperatures. In the meantime, I went to the Whip’s office through soft channels and got everything on Forster slowed down a little, just to buy us a day or two.
Jeffers and Barney were pretty easy to convince. I fancy Billy Hutc
hins might have talked to them along the way. Mark Broadbent was more dubious, but he could easily see how Rakely’s declared interests would make him a desirable asset for Defence. Mark knew that if he smoothed the path for Rakely, he’d get his reward in due course.
Only Alex Hardiman was against it. He positively didn’t like Rakely. When I gently pointed out that there was nothing about Rakley to dislike, he insisted that was exactly it. Hardiman was old school, a real veteran, and in the main I think he objected to Rakely’s sheer colourlessness. He liked Forster very much. Forster reminded him of Billings, and our last glorious days in the sunshine.
We were stymied, to be honest. We had to make the call one way or another. The PM was on the inside now, and he was waiting for our brief. We had to go one way or the other. What we couldn’t afford was a delay, or the impression of dithering.
We all went up to Chequers for the weekend. On the drive up, I was fully braced to throw in for Forster after all, because the party listened to Hardiman. His opinion would be the clincher. When we arrived, we heard the news. We actually didn’t realise quite how serious the stroke was at first. All we knew was that Hardiman was in hospital and he wouldn’t be joining us.
It was rash, I suppose, and a little disingenuous to Alex Hardiman not to represent his feelings on the matter, which we all knew full well. But we went in like gunslingers, the four of us, and quite dismantled Brian Templestone’s cheerleading for Forster.
The PM was swayed. I think we’d taken him by surprise. He needed a deal of convincing, though, because he was reluctant to let Forster go. I called Rakely at home, and told him to be in the Cabinet Office on Monday morning. The PM would drop by for a quiet chat before the afternoon vote on the Freight Tariff Act, which was the next meaty piece of legislation looming in the queue leading to the Health Bill. It was going to be a rough ride, and the meeting would simply look like the PM popping by to glad-hand some of the party faithful and generate a little confidence before the vote.
Magic Page 7