The Black North

by Nigel McDowell

  But then a sharper voice spoke, and all other Witches were quietened –

  ‘My daughters.’

  Oona remembered words from the Boy of the Big House: the Mother, their Queen. She listened, and the same sharp voice continued, like the slow scratch of a fingernail along stone –

  ‘We waste time with such games when there are more pressing matters, don’t you agree?’

  An agreement in silence, no reply came.

  ‘I trust that you are aware of the presence of another close by?’

  Nothing in Oona moved.

  ‘Someone of great interest just beyond our nest?’

  Oona tried to make herself ready for what might come but all she had for encouragement was her own wilful and contrary heart, and a final whisper by her ear, one of the girls in the wall returning to say, ‘Now she’ll take you and toy with you but listen – the only way to stop her is the claw. If you can take the claw off her altogether that’ll kill her, and then the other ones won’t know what to do. They say whoever holds the claw of the Mother of the Briar-Witches controls the whole lot of them.’

  ‘Bring her to me.’

  Oona had no time for reply, no time to nod or thank the trapped child as the rattle of roots sounded over the entrance to the nest like an agitation of old bones. The ground churned beneath and Oona’s hands went fumbling for a weapon, thoughts skipping – knife, pistol, Stone? Fight or slash or shoot or –?

  Claws around her ankles –

  Oona knew purest panic – earth in her eyes and mouth and throat, thickening on her tongue and no seeing and nothing heard as she was dragged down into dark.

  51

  When air came again it was clammy and sour – spiked with the same kind of stench as in the garden of the Big House. But worse. Oona was released, spat and dragged dirt from her eyes and spat more. She realised her hand didn’t hold the Loam Stone. And her satchel? Couldn’t find it. What about her knife? She didn’t try for it. And dragging more earth from her eyes made her wish away sight: surrounding were so many lips peeled back from so many mouths, blank spaces all adding to the reek with impatient blasts of putrescence.

  Then the sharper voice said –

  ‘Such a skinny thing! Just a collection of bones with skin like a bag thrown over and another foul, fake skin over that. Hasn’t eaten much in days, I’d say. Small breakfast this morning maybe? Bring her closer, my daughters.’

  Oona saw the mouths mass, pressing forwards. Then claws, then clubbed hands – one hand went to the back of her neck and a sharp spur settled at the soft hollow of her throat. Again Oona was dragged, over broken earth and discarded bone to a whorl of snapped stick and reed. Something dark and glistening had been smeared to bind it together, and the sharp voice of the Mother was speaking from this tangle: ‘Why have you come here, child?’

  Oona said nothing. Sweat covered every bit of her. She watched, but didn’t see anything until the Mother moved. A scalp sprouting rushes stirred, and Oona discerned a face – a stiff mask of encrusted earth that cracked and split as the Mother of the Briar-Witches spoke:

  ‘Why would you come here? Why venture down when you know well the stories? Why seek us out? You think you have something you can accomplish?’

  Oona was seeking but didn’t see eyes. She saw the Mother’s claws twitch – one almost human, nails long and thick and curling, the other rough and misshapen, bloated, its spur longer and thicker and sharper than the others Oona had seen, felt. Still, Oona said not a thing. She couldn’t reach for her knife, had no gun near, no Stone – no notion of what to do.

  ‘And I see you are not unaware of my daughters. You have encountered them before.’

  The Mother of the Briar-Witches ran a long finger over the wound on Oona’s hand – her touch was the coldest thing, and at this slow caress the pain in Oona awoke, a memory of the hurt returning to bite. It made her wish to scream, but she wouldn’t. Can’t! thought Oona. Mustn’t show more weakness.

  ‘You escaped before?’ said the Mother.

  ‘I did,’ said Oona.

  ‘It has made you bold. You think if you found escape once, you can find it again?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oona. She swallowed. ‘I will.’

  Outrage from the other Witches – hissing and spitting, phlegm and venom spilling.

  ‘Silence,’ said their Mother, and the Witches were quietened. ‘Only a childish arrogance, thinking you can change a world already so changed. There is nothing you can do now to stop the ones from across the sea. The King of the North, of the Echoes – he commands all things. You will, in the end, bow to him. Or you will be destroyed.’

  ‘Then I’d rather be destroyed,’ said Oona.

  ‘See – she is a stubbornly proud one, this girl.’

  A new voice, and Oona recognised it immediately. The Briar-Witches shifted, and Oona was allowed to see: Master of the Big House, huddled in his father’s cloak in a corner. He was cowering, but at the same time nothing about him said ‘prisoner’.

  ‘I think you’ll agree I’ve brought you a good one,’ the boy said. His mood at that moment: mixture of haughty, proud, but not without fear. His gloved fingers fiddled with the brass buttons on his cloak. Fiddled and fiddled. And he spoke only to the Mother of the Briar-Witches, throwing her looks and then looking away but anyway beseeching: ‘You promised that if I brought you every child in Loftborough or told you where they were then you’d restore my sister! You said that you’d make her human again and lift the dispells on us and on our home!’

  ‘I did promise,’ said the Mother. ‘Did indeed. And you have been useful.’

  Oona saw the human side of the boy begin to shake and she wished she could take hold and do more than shake him, the two-faced fool! Then, from behind him came briars snaking, closing slowly around his ankles, creeping around his wrists and across his neck –

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘No! I did as you asked!’

  ‘My promise was this,’ the Mother told him, her voice too calm. ‘If you had stopped your yapping and listened properly, this is what I promised: that once all the children of this town were ours, I would release you and your sister. But there are many types of release, boy. So your release will come now, as will that of this girl that you’ve brought. And I assure and promise you this – your sister will have her release soon enough, too.’

  Oona was suddenly thrown from the Mother’s grasp like something foul, falling, and she was quickly encircled by salivating Witches. Their Mother spoke, slow and delicate and sly: ‘My daughters – you may now satisfy yourselves on the final two children of the town of Loftborough.’

  52

  Briars went for Oona boasting thorns two fingers long and she scrambled back. Her hand went for her knife – wasn’t there. She looked but could discover nothing for protection – no weapon at all to save her. Then unlikely help came – from faces in the walls, the girls who’d been snatched and trapped were emerging, swarming to one point and all shouting, ‘Over here! It’s here!’

  Oona looked again – below where the faces showed was her satchel. She crawled for it, claws at her feet all grabbing, and she was kicking – anything that touched she fought against. Then her fingers found leather and they hunted: whatever came to her hand first she was determined to use. It was the Loam Stone. Oona turned and wielded it –

  ‘Stop!’ she cried. The Stone’s light was small, unwilling. ‘I have power you don’t! I can see what haunts you all, what nightmares you have, and I’ll use them against you and don’t think I won’t!’

  The Briar-Witches stalled, so many eyes and claws and mouths around her. Then they looked to their Mother for guidance.

  ‘What is this?’ said the Mother. ‘Nothing less than legend and rumour and whisper made real! Can it really be the Stone? The Darkness and the Seeing?’

  ‘It is,’ said Oona. ‘And I’ve learned how to use it, so stay back!’

  Then the worst laughter from the Mother of the Briar-Witches, and implacable words:
‘That Stone can have no effect on me or my daughters. How can we nightmare? We are made of such nightmares.’

  Every word spoken by the Mother was true, and Oona knew it. And knew nothing else, the Stone cold and empty in her hands.

  ‘Take her!’

  Briars bound Oona’s body, squeezing and wanting to strangle, tendrils itching towards her throat, and she had only one thought, one wish, one image in her mind – for Merrigutt to find her, as jackdaw or old woman or any way she chose to appear, and in answer the Loam Stone blazed against Oona’s hand, so hot she was certain she’d have to release it …

  Something dark dropped to the ground and a voice told Oona –

  ‘Didn’t I say, my girl? Didn’t I say there’d come a time when you’d wish you’d not gone wandering off!’

  It was a jackdaw.

  The scream of the Mother: ‘Grab that bird!’

  A precise plucking of her beak and Merrigutt discovered Oona’s knife and lifted into the air, swooping and dropping the blade by Oona’s hand as the Mother screamed again –

  ‘Stop her! Woman of the North transformed, shame to her family and exile – stop her!’

  All the Mother’s attention was on the jackdaw flying and evading claws and teeth. So no one noticed Oona cutting herself free, slipping the Loam Stone back into the satchel. No one saw her inch closer to the Mother, readying herself for the strike. No one but one: just feet from the Mother and hands came to Oona’s ankles to anchor her – one hand flesh and the other stone …

  ‘Please don’t!’ the boy of the Big House said. ‘I want my sister back and this is the only way! Don’t kill her!’

  And Oona took such pleasure this time in kicking, her heel catching him on the aged side of his face. The boy of the Big House released her but –

  ‘I have her now!’

  Merrigutt was caught in the Mother’s long-fingered hand and Oona watched the Mother’s mouth widen to a fathomless dark, ready to drop the jackdaw inside.

  The girls’ faces appeared again in the walls, a chorus of support for Oona –

  ‘Get her! Stop her!’

  ‘Do it now! Strike the Mother!’

  ‘The claw! Remove the claw!’

  So Oona stood and lunged – first slash of the knife was to the hand that held Merrigutt, releasing her, the Mother shrieking.

  Merrigutt added her voice to the din: ‘Do it now, my girl!’

  And Oona slammed the blade against the Mother’s clubbed claw. It left the wrist, fell heavy to twitch and squirm and weep black and half-scratch at the ground. But the scream that exploded from the Mother of the Briar-Witches sent Oona flailing onto her back. Everything scuttled and roared, every Briar-Witch opened her mouth as wide with the same pain.

  ‘Vermin!’ was the scream and the echo. ‘Plague! Pest!’

  And screams and echoes to match the Witches: from the children in the walls, all rushing to surround a darker place in the nest and telling, ‘Here! There’s a way out! Over here!’

  Merrigutt swooped and snatched up the claw, shouting to Oona, ‘Quickly! Follow!’ and then she vanished through the dark in the wall.

  The nest was collapsing, Witches being buried –

  Oona grabbed her satchel and slung it over her head, knife still in one hand. And with the other hand she took the boy of the Big House by the hair, telling him, ‘Come on, you two-faced get, or I’ll leave you down here with them!’

  Oona whispered thanks to those faces, those girls overarching the way to escape, and then she crawled on into the dark. And up. A climb through a passage near vertical that crumbled at every scratch, fingers and toes working hard, Oona feeling like she was having to burrow. And still the screaming behind them, the ceaseless rage and roar of the Mother –

  ‘Follow them, my daughters! To the ends of the North, to the edge of everything – stop them!’

  53

  Oona arrived at a rim of earth and sank the knife into somewhere above, using it to heave herself free. She emerged into a different dark, and such welcome cold. Stars were starting. What surrounded looked like night. But Oona was beginning to realise that in the Black there could be no firm naming of things like ‘night’ or ‘day’. They were in a place of constant gloaming – a ceaseless desire always towards Black.

  There was no sight of the Big House or its Rotten Hill. Then Oona heard once more the almighty creak and complaint of Loftborough: across the Black, she saw houses long-legged and lurching in the wind.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ said Merrigutt, almost lost, only two yellow eyes seen hovering near the ground. Beside the jackdaw, Oona saw the severed claw from the Mother of the Briar-Witches. Oona took a step towards and the claw shifted – still the slow opening and closing of its fingers, like an enduring wish to strangle.

  ‘Would you kindly now release me?’ asked the Master of the Big House.

  Oona still held two things tight – knife, and the boy’s hair. She relieved herself of one but kept hold of the other: the blade went back into her cloak so she could use both hands to clutch the boy and shout, ‘Why did you lead us into that? You should’ve just told us what was happening and we would’ve helped!’

  But the boy said nothing. Mood? Contrite, humble, whimpering and lamenting, the aged side of his face gathering tight for tears. And this angered Oona all the more, made her shake him and shake him as though he might shed the answers she wanted. But Merrigutt came to Oona’s shoulder and said, ‘Just leave him. Not worth bothering with.’

  So Oona stopped. She released the boy, letting him slump onto Black.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And I offer my humblest apologies for –’

  ‘Oh, give over!’ Merrigutt told him. ‘You’re an insufferable dose and spoilt rotten! And don’t even think about mustering any more of those hearthside-tale-tears, for you’ll get no sympathy from either of us! Treacherous brat.’

  ‘I deserved that,’ he said. He didn’t weep. ‘You are quite right and I accept it. I won’t be long left in this world anyway, at least not in the form I’m accustomed to.’ And he unbuttoned his father’s cloak to show: the arm that had been flesh was darkening, being seized by stone, a greyish crust creeping down from the shoulder. Soon he’d be the same as his sister.

  Oona felt she should ask Merrigutt, ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

  ‘No,’ said the jackdaw. ‘There’s no reversing of it. It’s the kind of magic that –’

  Then the boy said, ‘Wait! Quiet! Do you hear that?’

  Oona listened. The fall of boot and hoof on stone? The call of male voices? She heard, saw: a mass of firelight was marching, on horseback invading. Arriving, just as the Briar-Witches had said.

  ‘The Invaders,’ said the boy. ‘They’ve come to –’

  ‘Wait,’ said Oona. ‘Quiet. Do you hear that other thing?’

  They listened, and heard this sound: the rattle of collected metal. And then hardly a sound at all, like the end of hearing: a deepening hush, a silence like the place after a man’s last breath. Oona looked at Merrigutt, and both knew: it was the prompt arrival of a funeral coach; pulled by a silent stallion, driven by a figure of shadow, and summoned by the promise of death.

  54

  ‘We make haste back to my home,’ said the boy of the Big House. ‘And quick – it’s the only place safe now.’

  But Merrigutt and Oona agreed: ‘Nowhere safe.’ The call of an Invader made them all recoil –

  ‘Search every rickety place in this dump! Don’t stop until you find that child!’

  Oona thought of the Briar-Witches, their words: ‘prizes’ is what they’d spoken of, children being brought to them. Then more orders from the Invader’s voice, a shouting of, ‘And make sure she has that object our King described!’

  ‘They’re looking for you,’ said the boy of the Big House, and with more than half of him stone he had to limp and drag towards Oona. ‘That Stone – it is what they want. They know that you have it.’

  ‘If y
ou even think about betraying us again,’ said Merrigutt, and she threw herself at the boy, wings batting his face with furious dark. ‘If I even see a hint of a notion coming into your eyes about giving us over to the Invaders then I’ll –’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything of the sort!’ said the boy.

  ‘What now?’ Merrigutt asked, back on Oona’s shoulder. ‘What are you going to decide?’ Oona didn’t speak: she was thinking things almost hopeful, things she wasn’t ready to say.

  ‘They’ll burn the whole place to cinders,’ said the boy. ‘They won’t care! They’re remaking the North anyway so –’

  ‘Quiet!’ snapped the jackdaw, and she asked again of Oona, ‘Are you going to speak or not? We can’t stay here watching. If you want my opinion, we’ve done all we can and more than enough. You did well – that Mother of the Briar-Witches is likely dead now after losing her claw, so the other ones won’t know what to do without being told.’

  ‘I beg to differ,’ said the boy. ‘It won’t stop the daughters from attacking. The Briar-Witches may no longer be organised, true, but that doesn’t make them peaceful. If anything, I’d venture that makes the more dangerous – they’ll be feral now.’

  ‘No one asked for your opinion,’ said Merrigutt. ‘Isn’t there a fountain for you to go and stand in?’

  And they argued, voices shrunken by that hush – the quiet brought close by the Coach-A-Bower. And at last, Oona decided, but with no need for words – she quickly plucked the claw of the Mother of the Briar-Witches from the ground and added it to her satchel, and then ran back towards Loftborough.

  Merrigutt was in the air, flying close to follow, demanding, ‘What the blazes are you doing?’

  ‘Something,’ Oona told her.

  ‘Well, you might want to slow or himself is going to end up as a fence-post in a field!’