‘Are you all right? Anything broken?’
‘I’m … I’m OK.’ He moved some more, felt and tested his body and I saw how the seatbelt had held him in place, stopped him from being hurled through the windscreen. With me in the back though it was only the way the mail had pitched up, a split-second barricade of soft protection against the headrests, that had come between my body and a headlong artery-slicing death.
I breathed slow and deep, filled my lungs, tried not to think about it. Dad’s stolen mail had saved my life. It was what you might call an irony – one of those things adults laugh at all the time and feel clever doing it, saying something like How Completely Typical. Maybe it would feel funny to me too, later on. But it didn’t right then.
‘Where’s Haxforth?’ Suddenly I saw how the driver’s seat was empty, the door levered partway open. ‘He’s not here.’
‘Up there …’ Daniel said.
The shock of the accident must have done something to my head, to how it worked out times and distances, because once I’d kicked my way clear of the nosedived van and splashed through the icy water at the bottom of the drainage ditch and scrambled up the bank, the ghostly figure of Haxforth was disappearing into a line of woodland and he seemed to be about half a mile away already.
‘What’s going on?’ Daniel whispered, pale and breathless beside me.
Haxforth stopped, turned. Down by his feet I saw the black square shape of the spade he’d taken from the shed. It was easy, seeing all that. The moon-ceiling and the frost-carpet threw light off each other. He waved an arm at us. The gesture was unmistakable. It said, Follow, follow.
‘Do you think we should?’ You could tell just by looking how much the crash had shaken Daniel. It would have shaken anybody. But to think of turning round now, of going home? Apart from anything else there was all that mail in the back of the van. No way could we leave it there, abandoned at the bottom of some farmer’s ditch.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll lose sight of him otherwise.’
We ran, Daniel and I, ran to catch up. The trees were nearer than they looked and through them I saw that Haxforth was limping. Had he been injured in the crash? On into the woods where twigs and branches glittered with frost. I could almost see the crystals growing one on top of another, spinning their furry points, their patterns of ice.
The trees thinned and stopped. Haxforth was waiting for us there. We were standing on the edge of a little valley set into the hillside. Not that it was a proper geography-definition valley, more like a long dip or scar in the landscape. Still somehow it felt like a high-up sort of place, a sky-pressing place. Perhaps that was because of the way the moon filled the sky. But the moon wasn’t the brightest thing in that place, not by a long way. There was something else giving off light. You could’ve seen it miles away, a super-bright beacon. Or, I don’t know, maybe nobody ever saw it but us.
‘Shuttle Hill,’ Haxforth said.
Chapter 44
You know how it is on Bonfire Night, lighting a sparkler and waving it around, making shapes in the air? How you see the trails left behind, burned into your vision? Well, think of that effect, multiply it, add zeros at the end. That’ll give you a good idea.
An apple tree stood at the centre of this little valley, this sky-pressing scar. Full grown, thick with glossy leaves, hung with fruit. And from top to bottom it glowed and burned like the after-image of a sparkler, or maybe like something erupted from the deep molten parts of the earth, the magma we never think about walking around every day on the cold forgettable crust. But there was no fizz or crackle to it, it was silent, completely, eerily silent.
Straightaway I wished I’d never seen it because it was an impossible thing and I knew it’d haunt me forever. It wouldn’t help too much with trying to forget the doctor on the radio and what he’d said that time, how I might inherit Mum’s condition and end up hearing things one day and seeing them too. Mild hallucinations, to begin with. Auditory and visual.
Like there was anything mild about this.
Old Beautiful circled the tree, not dark any more like oil or shadow but more like a shard of flying flaring magnesium.
‘All round here,’ Haxforth said softly, ‘all around – there were orchards.’
I went nearer to the tree. Daniel beside me was doing the same. Thank god he’s here to see this, I thought. Thank god it isn’t just me. Coming up close, seeing the patterns in the bark, you felt you could almost get lost in it, be at one with the tree somehow. I don’t know what it was really or how to describe it except to say there was a sort of stillness in there that moved. It ran like bright rivers in the clefts and crevices of the tree. Words can’t capture it. Words don’t come anywhere near. But you knew if you put your hand into that running stillness, it would take you somewhere. I don’t know where exactly. And then everything inside would be peaceful and green, or blue, only you might not ever be able to leave. Once you were in it. You might not want or be able to leave it behind and return to the world of houses and cars and schools.
I glanced across at Daniel, saw him wide- and glassy-eyed, knew he was thinking all this too.
The light didn’t seem to affect Haxforth at all. I shaded my eyes, turned with an effort away from the silent firework tree, watched him poking around in the undergrowth a little off to one side. He was definitely limping, moving with difficulty. You could hear every sound he made, every breath that seemed suddenly to be a wheeze, every straining spade-scrape.
Chnnck.
He raised the metal blade over a bulging scrubby place and brought it down. Did it again, cut the soil, started to dig.
Chnnck. Chnnck. Chnnck.
I pulled Daniel away from the tree. Some of its bright hypnotising life seemed to be dimming already. Together we watched Haxforth work the spade.
‘What’s he doing?’ Daniel whispered. ‘What’s he digging for?’
Haxforth looked up. Looked direct at us. The thin combed hair, the winter coat. He might have been any old bloke turning the soil at his allotment. Only the cracked skin gave him away. And those eyes. White, not yellow or bloodshot, but still the tiredest eyes I’d ever seen. He grunted something and bent his head and drove the spade down into the earth again.
Chnnck! Chnnck! Chnnck!
‘Hey,’ I said, going over to join him, kicking at the displaced soil. ‘It’s soft. This is almost mud! But – everywhere else is frozen solid …’
The metal blade flew down, rebounded with a dull clang.
Hitting stone.
A slab. Hidden under the earth, cracked down the middle. The crack must have been there before, no spade could have made an impact like that. Haxforth got down on his hands and knees to scrabble the mud away and so did I.
We lifted one half of the slab away. Daniel helping with the other. Underneath there was a deep black hole. No moonlight reached down there, none of the fading apple-tree light either. Haxforth was puffing and blowing and his skin looked like paper that’d been crumpled and then smoothed out.
He rocked back on his heels, steadied himself with those thin white hands.
‘This is where it happened.’
‘Where what happened?’ Daniel said.
‘The Old Magic. The ceremony. One thousand years ago.’
I glanced back at the tree. The light was almost gone now. It really was like that experiment at school, igniting the magnesium strip – burns so bright and dies so fast. Its branches had drooped and the apples themselves were gone, fallen into the frost underfoot perhaps or disappeared somehow in the white heatless blaze.
‘If either of you boys has a torch,’ Haxforth muttered, ‘please, switch it on.’
There were tears on his cheeks, I saw now, silvery threads from moon-swamped eyes.
I took my torch out of my pocket and flicked it on. Daniel had one too, did the same. We shone the beams down into the hole.
There were some old grey pots and a rust-eaten sword.
There was gold. There w
as lots of gold.
There was a long dusty skeleton.
‘My brother,’ Haxforth said. ‘My king.’
Chapter 45
‘That’s your brother?’ I heard myself say. ‘But he must be – you must be – centuries ago …’
‘We were born athelings,’ Haxforth said. ‘Both of us. No ordinary nobles though. Royalty. For a long time I didn’t understand what that meant, not properly. We grew up laughing, that’s how I remember it. All our lives spent in sunshine. Then everything changed. One minute we were climbing trees. The next they were putting a crown on his head.’
‘They?’
‘The other nobles. The heads of families, those who called themselves thanes or earls. He was too young for it, far too young. Everyone knew. It was what they wanted, you see, what they’d planned for – their chance to control the sovereign, the highest authority in the land. But how can you influence someone who listens only to the voices inside their head?’
I thought of Mum, of how the last time I’d seen her the flickering-inside-candle that was her real life had looked like it might go out forever. ‘I know what that feels like,’ I said, but so quietly I knew Haxforth hadn’t heard.
‘The signs were there before he came to the throne. When he was what you would call a teenager. Only afterwards did it worsen. How it worsened. And something like that, it can’t be hidden forever. Gossip starts, word gets out. The healers could do nothing for him. The priests had no answers. “Pray for him,” – that was all they could say. What use was that? If a king is ruined, his kingdom perishes with him. Crops, cattle, people – everything withers. The land dies, or lies open to invasion.’
Haxforth’s face edged into darkness, closer to the mouth of the pit. In the moonlight I saw earth crushed hard between the fingers of his cold-clawed hands.
‘There was a belief in those times: if evil lived inside a person, a disease or an illness, it had to be driven out. Cut out and removed. It couldn’t be discarded afterwards, however. Disease can’t ever be destroyed, not completely. It needs to be taken on by another creature – transplanted into them and carried safely away. That creature becomes a living sacrifice. Ordinarily an animal was used, but if the person was important, or the disease untreatable, something more was needed. Something of greater worth. And should a terrible affliction be visited upon the most important person of all, then the vessel, the sacrifice, had to be human. Someone of high status. A member of the same family.’
‘The same family?’ Daniel’s voice was hushed. ‘You mean – you?’
‘The younger brother. Still a child on the night they took me from my bed.’
I flashed the torch across Haxforth’s face and wished straightaway that I hadn’t, pointed the beam right back down the hole. It would have been cruel, shining any more light on that face. It was too exhausted, too far gone with sadness and regret.
‘It was forbidden, even then. The new religion was everywhere, the religion of the Christ figure. But still there were certain people, certain individuals travelling secretly, men who could be found if they were needed. Someone, somewhere, made the decision – petition the Old Magic at midsummer. Drive out the madness. They were waiting for me here. He was waiting for me here.’
‘Something like that … it isn’t possible.’
‘I’ve never stopped seeing his face. The magician. The scars striping his body and the feathers and dirt in his hair. He wore a necklace of apples, whole apples, down to his knees. He was like a star fallen to earth. You only had to look into his eyes to know that. Someone who could reach deep into life’s pulse and turn it any way he wanted. A true monster – the only one I ever met.’
‘But the tree – and Old Beautiful …’ Daniel said.
‘The things he used. The tools he reached for at midsummer. The swallow was inside an iron cage, a cage with a circular door, just large enough for a human head. We knelt before it, my brother and I. The cage went first to him. Later in the night it came to me.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘You had to put your head in?’
‘There were arms holding us everywhere.’
‘So Old Beautiful acted sort of like an amplifier,’ murmured Daniel. ‘Or a gutter, carrying away dirty water …’
‘They released it afterwards. They didn’t care what happened to it then. It had served its purpose.’ Haxforth gazed down into the pit where our torch beams were still crossing. ‘So had I. They led me away as the sun came up. The king stood piled high with apple blossom. That was the last time I saw him.’
‘Until tonight …’
‘Until tonight. One thousand years. The span of time they deemed necessary to protect against any return of the madness.’
A sort of shuddering sound spilled out from Haxforth’s throat and for a moment I thought – well, I don’t know what I thought. But all that’d happened was the tears had stopped filling up his eyes. I saw that clearly enough. Perhaps there weren’t any more to come, ever. How could a body keep living that long anyway? How could all the muscles and chemicals and liquids, all the important inside stuff, keep on moving forever like the sea?
‘The heads of families, the thanes and earls, they agreed it among themselves. A request was made – and granted. I’ve been living all this time because men with the power to decide happened to think that was a nice safe number. A satisying number.’
In such cases the public expects a custodial sentence, I thought. Today that is what I am giving you.
‘But what happened afterwards?’ Daniel said. ‘To you, I mean?’
‘Oh, they sent me away with gold. A few trinkets to pay me off – their way of easing the guilt. As if such objects could do anything but endanger a child alone on the road. I trusted the first person who treated me kindly, and by nightfall bandits were hunting me down. Criminals happy to kill for a single gold coin. There was nowhere to go, no-one to turn to. I ran, went deeper and deeper into the wild, cried myself to sleep. When I woke up the moon was high and full, just as it is now – and there was Old Beautiful, watching me. That’s when I understood we were linked somehow, both of us cursed by that ceremony. I sealed the trinkets into a cleft in some rocks, hoping to come back for them in a week or two …’
‘The clasp?’ I said. ‘And the bracelet Christy took? …’
Haxforth nodded. ‘Perhaps that was part of the magic – the beginning of my exile. Some doors closed, others opened. All of them led away from here. The chance came for a place on a ship across the Channel. It was nostalgia that made me look for those things again, at the end. Curiosity. Nothing more.’
I closed my eyes. My brain felt dead and flattened out. I couldn’t think this through now. If it had been Mum telling me about kings and magicians and creepy midsummer ceremonies, I wouldn’t have believed the first word. But this was Haxforth. It felt real. Scary, but real. And wasn’t the evidence all around us?
‘And you’ve been a thief all this time?’ Daniel said.
Haxforth smiled and the skin around his mouth and eyes seemed to crackle as he did so. ‘I was brought up an atheling – no-one ever showed me how to work the land. Stealing was something I discovered a talent for.’
Slowly, carefully, not moving too easily, he dangled an arm towards the skeleton. His hand was shaking like a kite in strong wind. There was no way he was going to reach it though, it was too far down.
‘Swallows go over the water, you see. Always moving, never settling. Apple trees stay where they are, bountiful, growing roots, casting a protective canopy …’
I followed his gaze. All that gold lying there. I knew it was important, but somehow my torch beam kept getting dragged back to the skull which had rolled a little to one side. The dirt lay thick in its mouth and eyeholes. A row of teeth gleamed like Scrabble tiles on a rack.
‘Didn’t you ever hear them? If you were carrying them, the voices, like you said – didn’t you ever hear them?’
‘Not in the way he did. Or maybe they came, only one afte
r another – one life after another. There’s been so much of that. Too, too much.’
For a long time none of us said anything. Haxforth’s eyes were so far back in his head and empty of life now that they weren’t much more than sockets, dead volcano craters. Overhead the moon throbbed, throbbed fierce against my flatlining brain.
‘I’d like to sit under the apple tree one last time.’
So that’s what we did. He could hardly move at all by then so Daniel and I got him under the arms and carried him across to the tree. We did it all solemn and gentle and he weighed almost nothing. The tree was dead, cold, a peeling husk. Old Beautiful, Haxforth’s strange companion during his long magical exile, had vanished.
‘We’re the final echoes,’ he said into my ear, as we got him comfortable against the trunk. ‘After today, after tonight, the Old Magic won’t ever move in this world again.’
‘But, Haxforth, what about the mail? What do I do with it?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
I thought about it and Yes, it was obvious.
I touched Daniel on the shoulder, pointed the way out of the little valley. It wasn’t like there was anything more we could do for Haxforth. We both knew what was going to happen and it didn’t feel right, hanging around. Felt like a massive intrusion.
Through the trees, back to the drainage ditch and the wreck of the van. Stay strong, I told myself that whole time. Remember what we’re here for. Getting rid of the mail, keeping Dad out of prison. It was a fight to get the back doors open but we did it. One bag each, shoulder-slung or front-carried, whatever came easiest. Lucky it was downhill because each one seemed to weigh a tonne now, far heavier than they’d been back at the house. We stacked the bags besides the burial chamber, turned for the next lot.
Hill. Trees. Van. Bags, carry, stack. For a long time we did that and nothing else and all the time I tried not to look over at Haxforth, still propped unmoving against the trunk of the apple tree. After a while it was like even Daniel wasn’t there any more. He was a shadow that happened to be tagging along, fading away. The black sacks were agony in my hands. All I wanted to do was stop and rest, but I didn’t, I kept fetching them, hauling them, putting one foot in front of the other, just doing that and nothing else over and over and over again. Each delivery made me feel light as a butterfly when I dropped it, like I might lift into the night sky and never come down – then came the turn and the climb and the agony starting all over again.
Why I Went Back Page 18