Advent

  An invisible voice spoke, a whispering chorus of dead leaves. The molten glow stirred with the words.

  Flesh, Master. Recall your promise.

  The woman spoke in a voice horribly like and horribly unlike a voice Gavin remembered. Each word was a hard pebble in her mouth.

  ‘Who are these?’

  ‘Gwenny?’ Marina whimpered.

  Children of the house. The other voice was nowhere. It rustled from the chapel’s stones like speaking dust. The girl, a changeling. The boy, an orphan, and ward of her you seek.

  The shadow of the woman’s head lifted. ‘Then bring them in.’

  Gav found his will again. He tugged on Marina’s shoulders and turned to run. There was a confused terror of sudden whirling green in front of his face, coming at him from everywhere. Marina screamed. He was buffeted and scratched. He flung his hands up, closing his eyes, and something crashed into his midriff and sent him sprawling back though the doorway. Marina had fallen behind him. He tripped over her and struck his head, hard, on the stone inside, falling into darkness.

  Eleven

  Summer 1537

  Carissima, ‘dearest’, was what the magus called her. The name he had first known her by was an ill-fated one. Other names had been given by those who once venerated her, but that was long, long ago, and in his eyes they no more properly belonged to her than the beggar’s rags she wore.

  ‘Carissima, the world is changing.’

  She answered, ‘Change is the law of things, Johannes.’

  It was the fall of a summer night. All around was a flat horizon, calm water on one side, on the other the marshes and the wet plain beyond them, pocked with stumpy windmills. He and she walked along a ridge formed of sand and the stiff dune-grass. Though traces of the day hung around its edges, the sky was more brilliant than anyone alive in Gavin’s day could imagine. There was no moon, and Earth shed little light of its own in the year 1537, so apart from some skeins of cloud there was nothing to dim the stars. He looked up at their silent multitude.

  ‘This is a new kind of change. It touches even the fixed sphere.’

  She gazed upwards also, but said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps it touches even you.’

  She put her hand in his. It felt like parchment, dry and yielding. He opened her palm but read nothing there. She rarely spoke at all unless he broke the silence first, and sometimes not even then. He’d become used to the idea that he had to earn words from her.

  ‘The world has grown indifferent to you and I.’

  The Latin they spoke to each other composed their conversations to this courtly, formal manner. Johannes could never imagine addressing her in his native speech, though for all he knew every tongue in Christendom was known to her. It would be like a priest saying the Mass in the language of a Saxon peasant, addressing the Author of all things as if He were a market butcher. And yet such things were done now, he reminded himself.

  He stroked her open hand with a fingertip. ‘You are forgotten, shunned as a beggar by all save me, and I grow old, carissima, I grow old. What will you do when I am gone?’

  This time she answered at once. ‘I will grieve for you and long for you, my lord.’

  Domine, my lord, master. She never spoke anything but the truth. The wonder of it almost drowned him.

  ‘I would spare you that grief if I could,’ he murmured, holding her close.

  ‘Would you truly, Johannes?’

  The question surprised him. He met her look deep and unreadable as the sea. ‘Yes,’ he answered, full of reckless love. ‘I would. I would do anything for your sake.’

  She leaned her head on his arm. ‘You will regret what you do.’

  ‘Never,’ he assured her.

  ‘Never is a long time.’

  ‘I know my heart.’

  She smiled sadly, or came as close as a face not made for smiling could. ‘No one knows that.’

  ‘Do you doubt me?’ He was a little hurt, but it was no use expecting her to mollify him. He might as well look for sympathy from the sea along whose edge they walked.

  ‘You have said yourself that the world is changing,’ was all she answered, as she returned her gaze to the sea.

  ‘Not my heart. Not I. I still know what I have always known. But for other men, yes. Inconstancy grips the world. Even the wise no longer pay heed to my knowledge. And where the learned lead the unlearned will follow. I fear there will be no one to come after me.’

  He would have said more, but she pressed weathered fingers against his lips. ‘That is twice you have spoken of your death,’ she said.

  ‘Kiss me, then.’

  The stars became pinpricks of hard light, and the hiss and thump of the sea was muffled. They still stood on the dune, but now wrapped in a space that was not there or then, or anywhere or anywhen. As their lips parted, he saw her as he had first seen her, the gaunt solemnity of her face now rich with beauty. There was not a king between the utter west and the farthest east who would not have risked his throne for the chance to hear this woman call him ‘my lord’, domine. Giddy with bliss, he forgot his worries and drew her down to the cool sand.

  But though her warning went out of his head, the change he felt and saw in the world was not so easily ignored.

  Its first manifestation had been the indifference he began to meet with out of doors, an indifference sometimes bordering on disdain. When he had been an honoured doctor under the protection of the counts Palatine, petitioners had doffed their caps at his door throughout the year, and riders had brought letters from the greatest princes of Europe. Now no one came. If letters arrived, they were answers to his own prior supplications, and he dreaded reading them, because the refusals they contained were offered with something akin to contempt. Even his own patrons were unwilling to meet him publicly. His art had always been feared by the ignorant, and often treated with suspicion even by the educated and the noble, but never in the annals of magic had he read of it being ignored, let alone mocked. There were those now who openly compared it with the tricks of strollers and mountebanks, as if the living spirits of the universe, in all their myriad gradations, were no more than puppets or painted cards.

  He did not expect the common herd to distinguish his art from the puerile dabbling of the malicious or ignorant nobodies who called themselves magicians. But when he saw that even studious men no longer had any use for the wisdom he had spent his life pursuing, it was a different matter. It was not because they thought his art unholy, or even dangerous. It was – he only grasped this slowly – because they thought it irrelevant.

  Antique. Dead.

  That mankind was the pinnacle of earthly creation the magus did not of course dispute, but these new philosophers made man the measure of all things. It was as if nothing existed at all except as it appeared to his eye and was subject to his hand. All the subtler presences of the world, invisible and intangible, had no meaning for them at all. To their way of thinking, magic was not a sin, not a thing to be feared, or even doubted. It was merely unnecessary.

  Insidious as these opinions were, he might have dismissed them as simply another case of the usual folly of the world, were it not for the details that were circulating about Copernik’s work.

  The deranged theories of this one obscure canon in his faraway town at the mouth of the Vistula possessed the magus with a diseased fascination. He could not ignore them. The more he acquainted himself with them, the more he saw in Copernik’s single annihilating idea an epitome of the whole cancerous philosophy of the age.

  He knew, needless to say, that Copernik was wrong. He knew it the same way he knew that spring followed winter, that water flowed downwards. For decades he had been perfectly familiar with the several virtues of the fixed and the wandering stars. Seated in his observatory on a clear night, he could read their motions as easily as others might read a handbill, and while he worked in his laboratory, he mapped the auspicious or baleful influences they shed as they circled the mortal sphere. And yet
! And yet he could not deny that Copernik’s dreadful system corresponded in every particular to every motion that the mere eye observed. It dogged him like a recurring nightmare, that vision of the universe reduced to timbers and nails in a shipwright’s barn, a thousand disassembled dead fragments of the beautiful vessel whose parts they were. Everywhere around him honest men, men whose diligence and intelligence he acknowledged, shared the same vision. Their universe was a place not of creation but of manufacture, as if God were only a cunning architect, and wisdom consisted in deciphering the ingenious procedures by which His world had been mortared together. In the long light evenings, when noise from the streets carried inside the house, a reminder of how the indifferent city pursued its business outside his doors, he sometimes found himself looking at the codex open on his table and seeing only an inert heap of brittle vellum that would fray into dust after he was gone, the wisdom of ages decayed to inky rubbish.

  As midsummer passed, he tried to tell her more explicitly of his doubts and fears. The more he spoke of it, the more an unfamiliar melancholy began to take hold in his thoughts, as if he was no longer sure of what he knew to be true. She listened patiently, as always, but he began to feel he was throwing his words away.

  One day he asked her to be silent and listen until he had finished speaking, and then he told her all he knew of Copernik’s hypothesis. She listened as she always did, solemnly and without looking away; he sometimes felt that she never blinked.

  When he had finished, a sick dizziness came over him, as if he were trying to balance on Copernik’s spinning top. He knew the order of creation, sphere within sphere, the Earth at its still centre, and yet in his thoughts he could see the system of Copernik laid out like the mechanism of a giant clock, each part perfectly fitted, flawless. His understanding had split in two. He had no hold on himself: each half stared across an abyss at the other.

  ‘But which is true?’ he cried out, welling up with childish tears. ‘Which is true? Why will you not tell me the truth?’

  She held his head between her hands. Her expression was mute grief, as if there was something she wanted to say but could not: a pitying look. It was the first time he had seen weakness in her face.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ she asked, when he was quieter. ‘To know the truth?’

  When he thought back on that question the next day he was ashamed. It pained him to remember begging her, who called him domine, to settle the disputes of the clerks as if she were Holy Paul in Rome. There was a lingering humiliation in having been comforted by those knuckly hands.

  For the first time in a number of months he turned to work as a distraction and a relief. It occurred to him how far he had neglected his studies since the spring, and he found a guilty pleasure in returning his attention indoors, where she did not come. When they did meet again, he was careful not to refer to the subject that had troubled him.

  It was some weeks later, and he had assumed his aberration was forgotten, when – most uncharacteristically, and out of nowhere – she put the same question to him again: ‘Johannes, can you bear to know the truth?’

  It was a startlingly unpleasant surprise. They were walking, peacefully until that moment, by a musty riverbank on a warm afternoon. The magus’s mood soured at once.

  ‘I am magister,’ he answered loftily, after a pause. ‘A teacher. It is not for my own sake that I dedicated my life to knowledge. If I do not seek truth, who will? I cannot let the whole world suffocate in ignorance.’

  ‘The end you fear,’ she said, ‘is coming.’ She was quivering slightly despite the summer heat.

  He looked at her in astonishment. Who was she to speak to him of fear? Unwanted, accompanied by a prickle of shame, the memory of having cried in her arms like a boy with night-terror came to him again.

  ‘I am not afraid,’ he said.

  ‘My gift is going from me.’ She seemed not to have heard him. Her voice sounded strained, as if she were ill, or unbearably tired. She stumbled in the lank grass and would have fallen if the magus had not caught her shoulders. ‘Johannes.’

  ‘Carissima.’ He was amazed by how frail she felt. Her head bowed against his chest and a deep shudder ran through her, so violent that the magus instinctively looked up to see whether a sea wind was stirring the tops of the alders, or a cloud had blown across the sun.

  ‘I have carried this burden so long. For so long. I am tired.’

  Puzzled, he smiled an uncertain smile. ‘Then let me give you ease.’

  ‘You alone did not turn away from me,’ she whispered. ‘You stayed to hear.’

  He had never known her in this mood before. Usually so self-possessed, she seemed – he scarcely believed it – afraid. It softened him. His pride could not support the idea of receiving comfort from her, but now it was his turn to give it instead his truculence melted away.

  ‘I love you,’ he told her, for (though he did not know it) the last time.

  ‘You are still free to choose.’ Her eyes seemed to search inside his, pursuing some certainty that slipped away like an otter in the riverbank. ‘Men and women are always free. Will you take my burden from me, Johannes? Can you bear the truth?’

  He looked down at her, speechless.

  ‘It is a terrible thing to give,’ she went on. The afternoon glowed around them and the sluggish water passed by, thick with drowned pollen, insects crowding above it like flakes of dust in low sunlight. The day seemed altogether ordinary and yet the magus was beginning to suspect that something extraordinary was about to happen, that he was about to find out why she had come to him, across the ages, a living miracle. ‘I have tried not to speak of it. I have tried, Johannes. Words sting me and I stop my mouth. But I knew as soon as you came to me. I knew, though I fear for you.’

  He held her shoulders gently, coaxing. He was sure the answer to all the questions she had shied away from was near the surface now, coming up into the light. ‘What is it that you knew?’

  She hooked her hands over his arms. ‘All that time I have known. All that time I have waited for you. Waited, waited. A long road, Johannes.’ She was unburdening herself of words as if they were stones round her neck. His heart beat hard as he stood ready to catch her.

  ‘I am here now. Let me comfort you.’

  ‘Is this what you truly wish? To bear the burden? To know truth?’

  He could hardly believe what he was hearing and yet the meaning of it rushed up towards him, into the clear open air. Her burden. The truth. It was the very meaning of her ill-fated name: it was proverbial.

  Prophecy.

  He watched in mounting wonder as she unfolded her hands from his arms and clasped them together.

  There was a ring she always wore. He had barely noticed it before, even when their fingers were knotted together in passion. It was merely a pauper’s ring. Plain, oak-brown, unadorned. A beggar’s ornament. Now she was slipping it from the index finger of her left hand.

  He laughed a brief laugh of baffled delight. ‘Do you mean to wed me, then, carissima?’

  She stared at the ring with intense concentration and ignored his jest.

  ‘Once I broke a pledge.’ Her voice was barely audible, buried under the weight of ages. ‘This was my punishment. To carry the pledge with me always, and to know it broken.’

  The magus was used to riddling speech. It was the stock in trade of insubstantial beings. Lacking flesh and lacking freedom, they did not have the capacity to lie and so would often resort to evasions and obfuscations. He had never expected to hear anything of the sort from her mouth, however. He wondered whether she was distracted or feverish, though not once had he imagined she could suffer ordinary afflictions.

  She took his left hand and opened it, palm up.

  ‘I saw this, long ago.’ She lowered the ring into his palm. ‘The last punishment. Offering my burden to him I love. My gift.’ She withdrew her fingers. The ring lay in his open hand, warm and smooth.

  Her gift, the magus thought. His head fel
t as sluggish as the summer river, but through the confusion and surprise a swell of deep excitement was gathering. He knew what her gift was. Everyone did, everyone who could read. To know the truth. And he knew how long she had carried it. Always.

  Unendingly, beyond time. Deathless.

  He closed his hand over the ring.

  Part III

  Tuesday Evening

  Twelve

  They were rushing through a tunnel. The noise of it filled his head, and she was there, in the dark. Except now for some reason he wasn’t frightened, and the tunnel wasn’t coming to an end. Miss Grey looked steadily at him from somewhere that wasn’t next to him and wasn’t far away . . . There was a lot of pain, he noticed. The whistling dark began to rub away at everything. It seemed like she and he and the train were all about to dissolve into black sound, and then she said his name. She said it wrong, like she always did: instead of the ‘v’, which made your lips sneer for a moment, there was a liquid run of vowels in the middle, her mouth forming a little circle, a kiss.

  There wasn’t a train after all. Only her, speaking in the dark.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ he heard her say. ‘Don’t be afraid. You have come home.’

  She couldn’t make the pain go away, but nevertheless he was reassured.

  ‘The door is opening,’ she said.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said, and smiled. Her eyes looked different, less distracted. Oh, I know, he thought, it’s because she’s seeing right inside me. But where was he? He couldn’t work it out.

  ‘Come,’ she said. Then after a pause she repeated it, more sharply. Her look hardened. Then a third time, now definitely not an invitation but a command: ‘Come!’

  I can’t tell where I am, Gav thought. How can I go anywhere? He recognised this nightmare now. It was the one where everything got heavy, your muscles stopped working, you had to will each separate movement of your limbs but you could never get them to add up together. You couldn’t make yourself go.