The Black North

by Nigel McDowell

  And then Oona was laid down with such delicacy.

  A hollow knock – elbows and knees against wood. Oona writhed and found what was beneath her willing to shift, almost drift, but she had little room for moving – a small boat, she guessed. It shifted under the arrival of another, the Faceless Invader joining. More sound to be interpreted – she guessed at the soft touch of a paddle on water, and then they were moving on once more, fast.

  ‘Oh, just wait until you see it,’ she heard the Changeling say. The voice of the bird was low, a sound barely above the scurry and splash of water. ‘You will marvel at it! It is just the beginning of the new Kingdom. It will be the King’s greatest outpost, where I shall oversee things as his Captain!’

  Oona said nothing, too busy thinking: What about escape? Throw myself from the boat into water, but how deep?

  ‘No one can save you now, child,’ the bird assured her in the same soft whisper. ‘Do not contemplate anything foolish. And why miss the chance to see things that you have never seen before? Such marvels! Just wait … just wait …’

  Minutes more of dark and her own fruitless thoughts, and then the sack was suddenly torn from Oona’s head. She was content to breathe as a beginning, welcoming air like that moment of blessed emergence from the nest of the Briar-Witches. Cold bit – no cloak of her mother’s to protect her. Then she looked, and saw first a former-forest on either side of the river. Another miserable sight of destruction – only sawed stumps where trees had once been. But among them moved things. Figures? People, Oona decided. But all silent.

  ‘We had to put the men and women of the North to some good use,’ said the Changeling. ‘And they are hard workers, no doubt. Very keen in their wanting to serve their King.’

  Men and women, of course no children. But whether male or female – mother or father or grandparent – Oona couldn’t have told. There was too much Black on the people, their movements so slow and selfsame that there was no telling anyone apart. Made blank and anonymous by the dark, they were attacking any remaining tree with hatchets, snapping and stacking boughs.

  Then the bird on the Faceless Invader’s shoulder cried out with a reverence Oona thought ridiculous: ‘Behold!’

  Oona had to twist herself to see …

  Not so far off that it could be called beyond – a singular dark, final peak of the Melancholy Mountains soaring sharp against night-sky. It was scattered with enough white light to make Oona’s eyes cringe and weep, scattered too with enough crawling dark to make her wonder. But for all that was striking about the sight, the most disquieting thing was this: the slopes had been eaten-in and torn out, most of the remaining mountain bulging above and below. Hour-glassshaped, impossible-seeming. No, thought Oona. Possible, but only with some powerful magic to bolster it.

  ‘The Hollow Mountain,’ said the bird on the Faceless Invader’s shoulder. ‘Palace of the Ponderous Giants. Or I should say – formerly the Palace of the Ponderous Giants.’

  Closer then, Oona could watch what darkness wandered, working on the surface – many Muddgloggs were helping to dismantle the Hollow Mountain, earth remaking earth. And again closer – nearer and almost there – Oona saw Muddgloggs embedding narrow towers on the mountainside, great cylinders of granite that were already lit from within. The acrid taste of smoke settled on Oona’s tongue, darkness streaming from the mountain to collect in the sky.

  River narrowing, the mountain admitting them into an echoing dark, a sudden roar sounded that Oona’s imagination took for the Hollow Mountain itself – furious protest at its own transformation.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Changeling. ‘It sounds as though the Ponderous Giants are ready to speak.’

  68

  Oona had only a dim sense of activity ahead … and then suddenly such glare and din and industry from all sides. An enormous cavern opened around her, a space bounding with so many echoes of echoes of echoes that she couldn’t know where they began, where the first stroke fell or first mouth hollered or first spark spawned a flame. And so much fire: in the hands of Invaders heating metal and hammering, in furnaces overfed with felled trees, and in the hold too of countless soldiers hanging from ropes, working at openings that awaited the arrival of more lit Towers. The heat and stench was colossal, stung – so much smoke hopelessly seeking places to escape through. And some stranger activity – a tearing out, ripping of many helpless things. Books, Oona realised. Huge volumes as high as a man, their many pages being given a cursory glance then torn loose and added to the nearest fire.

  ‘Two caverns were revealed when we started our work!’ the small bird on the shoulder of the Faceless had to shout. ‘Two chambers, one beneath the other! So it made perfect sense to sculpt the Hollow Mountain into something more impressive, something more beautiful! This lower cavern will be a military base and the upper shall be my seat of command!’

  The river threaded on, carrying Oona into the midst of everything, commands flying –

  ‘Fast over here with that gunpowder, lads!’

  ‘Need more ballast for this, boys! Keep it moving, keep it steady!’

  ‘Gimme a hand with this, quick! Right men – all hands to this and lift!’

  And the results: rifles and pistols stacked, knives bound in leather and packed, cannons rolled, ammunition stockpiled … all the blunt and unforgiving instruments of battle being formed.

  ‘As I think you’ll agree,’ said the Faceless, ‘we have more than adequate resources to defeat any Cause that might seek to oppose us.’

  Oona couldn’t disagree. She felt a single tear trace a cold track down her cheek. She thought: war. Everywhere she looked the word screamed its promise.

  Another sound: bone-quivering and world-shuddering and, to Oona at least, heartbreaking. She heard the Changeling say, in a tone trying for softness, ‘Now what are they doing to those Giants? Why can’t they just leave the poor creatures alone?’

  Oona saw a large group of Invaders clustered close to the wall of the cavern, and above them, and taller than any twenty of the Invaders if they’d stood on each other’s shoulders: the male Giants of the Hollow Mountain. A dozen, all bald and brute-ugly and huddled tight together and bound around the ankles with iron and leather. But not much like the women Oona’d seen – these men looked more like infants overgrown, skin all bloated and in places blackened, naked but for rags knotted loose around their waists. And they were weeping. They were, Oona knew, the source of the terrible roaring. She heard words from the cluster of gathered Invaders, teasing –

  ‘You think you’re powerful just cos you’re big, do you?’

  ‘Think we’re scared of you?’

  ‘Big helpless babies, that’s all you are!’

  More roars. And roars of laughter too from the mob as the Giants tried for escape, attempting to scale the wall but with large, blunt, cumbersome fingers – no relief, no way free. And the Invaders continued to revel, prodding the male Giants with torches and crude brands, singeing skin so that the whole place shook with a Giant anguish.

  Then the Faceless Invader added his own roar to the cavern –

  ‘Cease this at once! Get away from those creatures!’

  As though scalded the rabble fell back, most dropping their fire and trying to distance themselves. Surprise, some shame, but Oona noticed some keeping close their conviction. The leaders who’d led the humiliation, who didn’t see a bit of harm in it – they refused to be cowed.

  The boat that had brought Oona and the Faceless at last reached rock. Invaders were swift in their stumbling forwards to help – a rope thrown and caught, slipped through an iron ring fixed into one of the largest rocks and the Faceless left the boat in one long stride. To Oona’s eyes he appeared to grow taller as he stalked up the slope towards the group of Invaders. Without forewarning he stopped and struck one of the soldiers, knocking them backwards – a blow with as much ease in it as Oona had seen in Loftborough. The soldier didn’t get up. And that crimson-eyed bird spoke with an anger Oona would’ve
attributed to a creature much larger: ‘So you bully and torment these creatures as though you were back in the playground? Do you not remember that this was their mountain before it was our own? We should show them respect!’

  Alone in the boat Oona made small moves, testing the ropes that held her, squirming free of the sack that enclosed her bottom half, seeing how possible escape might be. But one Invader on the shore saw and aimed his gun like he was going to shoot. She stopped.

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ said the Invader. He tried a sarcastic smile. ‘And if you think you’re going to be going anywhere without my say-so, then you’re a bigger fool than you look.’

  So Oona stayed, silently cursing, raging. She listened –

  ‘A report please, Corporal,’ said the Faceless, and an Invader stumbled forwards, a branch of fire still snarling in his hand. ‘Tell me: how goes the interrogation?’

  ‘Sir,’ said the Corporal, hardly knowing where to look, not sure whether to direct speech to the Faceless face or the bird on its shoulder. ‘Sir, we’ve been trying to get them to tell us about how to reach the Burren, but they ain’t talking. And we’ve looked through all their scrappy books but we can hardly read the writing in half of them, let alone understand any of it!’ He looked to the fire in his hand, cleared his throat. ‘So we thought more forceful methods were needed to get them answering.’

  ‘Forceful?’ said the Faceless. He took the torch from the Invader’s hands and closed one large hand over the flames to snuff them. ‘Or barbaric? We do not want to lower ourselves to the levels of the others who live on this Isle, do we?’

  ‘No sir,’ said the Corporal.

  The Faceless took a step towards the Giants and their whimpering rose once more and they pressed themselves closer to the wall, to one another’s comfort, fingers fumbling at toothless mouths.

  ‘We have been patient with you,’ said the Changeling. ‘We have treated you, I believe, with the utmost of respect. However, now my patience has been worn to its thinnest. I am going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer. Do we understand each other?’

  But the Giants their had ready words, a way of talking that sounded to Oona like the oldest rhetoric, querulous: ‘What right do you have to come here and disturb our quiet contemplation inside the Hollow Mountain? You being a creature born of broken earth and wicked magic. A being plucked like a weed by that creature on your shoulder, who you have bent to your will, that speaks for you? You, who has no soul but only a bitter will! You, who has known no love nor affection but only hate! You have come and you have broken! You have destroyed and opened these sacred caverns to the whims of a cruel world! What right do you have to commit such a crime? What authority do you have over us?’

  The Giants had all spoken more bravely than Oona would’ve reckoned. And like their wives: spoke so closely together that it sounded almost like rough song. The Giants went on: ‘You serve the creature that came across the sea! That King who is not Kingly, not meek nor mild! Oh King of un-Kingliness! No righter of wrongs! No doer of nobler deeds! No writer of wondrous –’

  ‘Quiet!’ shouted the Changeling. ‘Cease this lamenting, I’ve had enough of it!’

  The bird abandoned the Faceless Invader’s shoulder to circle, then return. And as in Loftborough – it had become something larger, darker, eyes both blistering.

  ‘Answer me this now,’ it said. ‘The place a dozen miles North from here, the place the river flows towards and you barbarians call the Burren: how do I locate it, and how do we enter?’

  The Giant’s reply, in delicate harmony: ‘Why do you wish to know the way into a place of such safety, of such healing? Why would you seek such solitude as it provides, that place of oldest North magic, where contemplation is prized and –’

  ‘I said enough!’ shouted the bird, and everything shook, everything stopped. All work within the Hollow Mountain ceased, every eye and all attention drawn to this confrontation. But Oona knew – no matter how much questioning, how much demand or threat, these Giants wouldn’t tell. Wouldn’t, maybe couldn’t: perhaps the answers were so buried so deep they wouldn’t rise, couldn’t be spoken. And some other had the very same thought –

  ‘Maybe they don’t even know, sir,’ said one of the Invaders. ‘They’re that old, maybe they can’t remember?’

  ‘How dare you!’ cried the Giants, and Oona saw them begin to rise. ‘We know all stories and tales and ways of this Isle! All legend that we have recorded and you now see fit to burn! Have we not sat in the dark within this mountain for generations, turning over all mysteries, poring over all notions large and small? Have we not –?’

  ‘Enough,’ said the Faceless one, interrupting once more. The Giants shrank. A pause, and the darkest colour seeped into the bird’s feather, into its voice: ‘Whether you wish to remember or not, I will have the information I need. Perhaps barbaric methods are indeed necessary.’ The Changeling turned crimson eyes on Oona, and said, ‘It is time to test the truth of legend: we shall see now how powerful and persuasive this Nightmare Stone can be.’

  69

  ‘I’ll bring her,’ said the Invader who’d been keeping keen watch on Oona, and he was as careless and as rough as he could manage in retrieving: by the hair or arm or wherever, dragging. But Oona refused to make any sound or scream, didn’t want to satisfy him. He dropped her by the Faceless Invader’s feet.

  ‘Untie her,’ said the Changeling.

  Some hesitation, but the same Invader yanked the knife from his belt. He gave Oona a long look as though he could do what he liked with the blade, with her. A jerk of his hand and he’d cut her bonds. Oona rose, watching the Faceless take the Loam Stone from its tunic: it was utterly devoid of light. But at the appearance of the Stone the Giants began to shiver and a low and wordless moan rose in their flabby throats.

  The Changeling told Oona, ‘Your task is simple, Oona Kavanagh: you are going to use this Stone to extract the truth I need from these Giants. And you are then going to tell me that information. Do you understand?’

  Oona didn’t offer answer. She didn’t want to touch the Stone. In truth was afraid of the thing and what new disgrace it might show. So she cleared her throat to say, ‘I can’t use it like that.’

  ‘Silly girl,’ said the bird. ‘How can you know, if you haven’t yet tried?’ The Faceless offered the Stone.

  And all Oona had seen and wished she could unsee squirmed to the surface of her mind as the shred of light squirmed wild within the Loam Stone. She shut her eyes, but no solace. No choice, she knew: the Stone was her possession whether she wished it or not.

  So Oona opened her eyes, and stepped forwards to reclaim it.

  Instantly: as though their separation had been a trauma and it had so many things it was anxious to share, the Stone showed Oona too much. Images all swift as light glancing on grey water –

  Cold fire –

  Shattered sea –

  Broken moon –

  Echoes –

  Screaming –

  Clawing shadow –

  Dust –

  Everywhere and everyone dust –

  Isle ending –

  And as with the landlady in Loftborough, Oona locked eyes with the Invader who’d taken her from the boat and was shown nightmares: he was powerless and cowering in a forest with Blackened trees, tangled boughs bearing flame but burning with a chill, soundless fire …

  Oona forced herself to withdraw. And she saw the Invader anew: whether he held rifle or blade or both, he was terrified. Was doing what he was doing because he was scared of what would happen if he didn’t.

  Oona looked quick to another Invader and (strange – somehow not a surprise) she saw the same nightmare in his mind: Black forest writhing with the same white flame. And fast, Stone growing hotter in her hands, she focused on another Invader, and then the next, and next, and another. And all were harbouring the same nightmare, all besotted by an identical fear.

  ‘Ask them now!’ cried the Changeli
ng, and Oona was forced to return fully. She looked up, eyes drawn to the crimson gaze of the bird. What nightmares waited there, Oona wondered? But no matter how long she looked, she saw nothing. Their crimson held no more than surface: no truth, no nightmare. And to Oona this was more terrifying than anything.

  ‘Ask them!’ the bird shrieked, wings extending, trembling.

  Oona shifted her feet and faced the Giants. She took a breath, then looked –

  Such nightmares were seething in the Giants! So many that she couldn’t discern any single thing, their worst imaginings engulfing her like sudden tide, collective fear, worry, remorse and mystification rushing. The only thing Oona did know: all their nightmares were of destruction and ending and plague and withering. All, she realised, were symptoms of the same: the destruction of their cherished Isle.

  ‘Well?’

  The voice of the bird came from far off, could almost have been ignored, but the grip that enclosed Oona’s arm couldn’t.

  ‘What did you see?’ the Changeling asked. ‘Did they show you the Burren? Did they tell how to enter it? How to tear through the old magic that surrounds the place?’

  Oona didn’t know what the Burren looked like, but she did know one thing. Unexpected, simple – how she was going to escape.

  ‘I did see something like that,’ said (lied) Oona. ‘I need to try again though. Their thoughts are all over the place, nothing clear enough for me to see.’

  Slowly, he released her.

  ‘Very well,’ said the Faceless. ‘Look only once more. And this time, you will find the truth I need. Or we may have to revert to the use of those methods more appropriate to the barbaric kind of this Isle.’

  Oona felt the shuffle and smile of the surrounding Invaders – she didn’t doubt their willingness, the eager and terrified torturer slumbering in all.