Advent

  Its serpentine hiss went unnoticed. The eyes belonged to a woman who was staring at the corner where the two ghosts were. Horror spread over her face.

  There was a dreadful scream. The room surged with sound and motion, men’s barbarous voices raised in anger. Amid the commotion the magus studied the one who had seen him and saw him still, judging by the unmistakable focus of her fear. A young woman, with a hunted expression and dark hair that was as disordered as all the others’ was oiled and fine. Shrinking backwards, she raised an arm, pointed directly at him and screamed again above the clamour, in a powerful voice rich with dreadful conviction, and went on screaming until someone struck her mouth. She went spinning to the floor. Dark blood smeared over the back of her hand. Tangled hair fell like a half-closed curtain in front of her eyes; she clutched at it. Her jaw shook as if resisting the torture of speech. The tormentor was too strong: her back arched, the sinews of her neck sprung tight as a viol’s strings.

  ‘Johannes Faust!’ she cried. ‘Johannes Faust!’

  Bloodless and bodiless as he was, the magus felt lightning pulse through him. A fury erupted in the room. The woman cringed against the floor, covering her head. A man seized her by the wrists and dragged her up on her feet, shouting. Another man, an old man in the front rank, spread his hands, gesturing for peace.

  ‘My name,’ the magus said hoarsely. ‘She knows me.’

  ‘Return now, Magister.’

  ‘Who is the one that knows me?’

  ‘Magister, do not delay.’

  ‘Answer me!’ The men were pulling her out of the room. He made to pursue and felt the spirit’s recalcitrance holding him back like a ghostly anchor.

  ‘Release me!’ She was already disappearing into the exterior shadows.

  ‘Heed us, Magister.’

  ‘You disobey? You have no freedom to do other than as I command you!’

  The empty face bowed, the trace of a ghastly smile on its glimmering lips.

  ‘I must question her.’ The rite was reassembling. The family and their attendants returned their attention to the droning celebrant by the fire, the crude idol in the wall.

  ‘She is cursed, Magister.’

  ‘Who is she? By what name is she known?’

  The voice lingered over the sibilance, as if the word were the hiss of a dying fire:

  Cassandra.

  Its answer held the magus like a spell.

  ‘Did you not know her, Magister, as she knew you?’ Its voice writhed among the chanting. Lost in a rapture he had forgotten he could feel, stretched out on the first stirrings of a peculiar bittersweet longing, the magus heard it only as the sound of cloth sliding over a stone floor.

  ‘Cassandra,’ he echoed.

  ‘She who broke her pledge, who scorned her gift. Now it scorns her. She betrayed the bond between mortals and spirits, Magister. Now she carries the betrayal with her. Beware her.’

  The last words broke through the magus’s fog of wonder. ‘What?’ He frowned. ‘What riddling is this?’

  ‘Her curse is called magic, Magister.’

  The magus began to grow angry. She was gone who knew where. He was losing time.

  ‘I must speak with her. Show me where she is.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘What? Do you dare offer disobedience?’

  ‘No disobedience. I am bound to ward you. Her curse is heavy.’

  ‘Curse?’ the magus scoffed. ‘Do you imagine I am ignorant of it? Is it not proverbial? A trick of speech, no more.’

  ‘You are ignorant,’ the spirit whispered, an answer that might have been calculated to enrage him.

  ‘You think I do not know what every pedant knows? Of course I know her legend.’ An argument between ghosts, chittering like mice in the roof. ‘To know the truth always, but never to be believed. Is it not so? She prophesied the fall of this city’ – he waved his spectral arm, gesturing contemptuously at the doomed family – ‘but they scorned her. You call that a curse? The truth is not a curse, Spirit. Not for such as I.’

  ‘Maybe, Magister.’

  ‘She called me by name!’ He gazed towards the dusty tiles where she had crouched. ‘She is a prophetess. I will speak with her. If you refuse to conduct me, then leave me.’

  ‘God-ridden,’ the shimmering face answered, leaning towards him. For a moment he seemed to hear burning in its speech, the sound of destruction. ‘God-broken. She holds the open door in her hand and suffers for it.’

  The magus would hear no more. By nature he could never tolerate the suggestion of a threat. Already a private hunger was gripping him, excluding all doubt. This was not the first time he had performed the extraordinarily difficult magic of clairvoyance, but never before had he felt anything like the shock of recognition and sympathy that had come when the fabled prophetess cried his name. He had arrived at the border of revelations and mysteries that had been lost for millennia. A whim, a foolish whim had opened the path to this vanished age of heroes, men and women who battled and bartered with spirits as familiarly as quarrelling neighbours. He could not turn his back on it.

  Most of all, he could not turn his back on her. Cassandra! Who saw what no one else could see and was despised for it. And to have now become one of her visions, himself! – no wonder, really, that he forgot Helen and, for the first time, found himself falling in love.

  The spirit protested as long as he permitted it to speak, so he silenced it and then banished it. He could not let cowardice hold him back. He would find another guide to return him to his true body, when the time came.

  Then, a spectre among the towers of Troy, he made himself go out into the night and look for her.

  He could, perhaps, have drifted through the many-gated city that night like the ghost of twenty centuries of songs and stories, watching the flesh-and-blood men and women whose short and barbaric lives were destined to be rendered undying by almost as many poets as there were years. From the top of one wall he looked westwards across the plain and saw the ominous light of watch-fires. There, he supposed, slept men whom time would remember as all but gods themselves. But nothing in all this world of bronze and fire and brutality was worth anything at all next to the one woman they despised.

  He searched fruitlessly. There was no order to the buildings that he could discern and, once inside, no arrangement of rooms he could recognise. After what was a long time measured by the turning sky of that place and age, he found himself once again in the painted hall where he had begun. The fire was out. Beetles and rats stirred in the shadows.

  She was there, waiting for him. She greeted his ghost by name.

  They spoke for a long time, the prophetess and the phantom, in a language that would have sounded like raving to anyone in the city. They spoke like equals. In his thirty-odd years of studying the breadth of creation, celestial and sublunary, the magus had always known each being he conversed with to be either lesser or (rarely) greater than himself, and accordingly had always listened humbly or interrogated imperiously. That night, for the first time, he simply heard and answered.

  When the high window-slits began to hint at dawn, she told him he had to leave.

  ‘I must see you again,’ he said. She knelt near the fire-pit, hands clasped around herself. Even though he was free of his flesh, he longed to touch her. She was as beautiful as wisdom. ‘Tell me,’ he begged, ‘how and when I can find you.’

  ‘I cannot, but I know you will.’

  He felt joy surge in his thoughts just as if his heart had leaped under bone. ‘I will return as soon as I have the power. The next night.’

  ‘You will not.’

  ‘I will. I swear it.’

  ‘No.’ She crouched lower, quivering slightly like a dying flame. ‘But you will see me again.’

  He remembered the trickle of blood from her mouth. ‘How can I leave you here?’ his tongueless voice said. ‘I know as you do what will happen, in this very room.’

  She looked at the statue of the goddess, then b
ack at him.

  ‘Then you know what will happen, whether you wish it or not.’

  ‘I would use all my power to spare you that, if I could.’ He could not bear the thought: the screams of terror as the city burned, the bronze armour hot with blood and the light of the flames, an enemy emptying ten years of fury onto her. This was why he had sworn never to love. Love enmeshed you in the horrors of a fallen world.

  ‘There is no such power. Yet because you hear me and wish me kindness, you will see me again.’

  ‘Then tell me how! Teach me the art by which I can return!’

  ‘You will not return.’

  In the east, above the mountains, a rich desert blue was spreading skywards. The magus knew he must go, but at that moment he would have surrendered his soul to stay a phantom at her side for ever.

  ‘Where, then? Tell me only where and I will work without cease or rest until I have found the way that leads me back to you.’

  ‘I cannot say. Yet you came to me and did not turn away and so you will see me again, even if I wait a thousand winters.’

  ‘A thousand winters?’ he whispered.

  ‘And more. Twice a thousand. And more. The road-god leads me a long road. Now go. You must.’

  It was true, though he fought against it. ‘But when?’ he cried, as the heavens opened wide to welcome the unseen sun and he began to slip away. ‘When?’ She blew on his ghost and the breath lifted him up like a feathered seed, and then there he was, lying on the floor of his laboratory late on a January night in the year 1537, his staff on the floor beside him and his face wet with tears.

  Eighteen

  It took Gav a very long time to make up his mind to go outside.

  For a year and more he’d dreaded the sight of Miss Grey. Since he’d got to grips with the awful discovery that she wasn’t real, he’d wished for nothing more than never to see her again.

  She stood unmoving, her shapeless cloak gathered around her, looking at the window from which he looked at her. The unkempt curtains of her hair hid her face. Even so, Gav could tell she was watching him, as he’d so often seen her watching, waiting. The alien murmurs floated around him all the while.

  He remembered how he used to talk to her, back in the time before he’d understood that she wasn’t supposed to be there. It had never seemed to matter that she didn’t answer.

  He’d never be that child again. That particular happiness was dead and buried. There was no unlearning what he’d learned so painfully from Mum and Dad and Mr Bushy and everyone else. Yet his heart had betrayed him, leaping with joy when he’d seen her, just the way it always used to.

  He tiptoed to the front door and opened it as quietly as he could. He was afraid she might have vanished in the interval, but as the night air poured in, he saw her there still, waiting. Hester had hung his coat by the door. He slipped it on.

  A wintry desertion lay over the road. The houses with their meagre front gardens petered out to his left into unlit barrens of fields and empty roads. Everything seemed frozen. You couldn’t imagine dawn coming, windows lighting up, people getting into cars and driving away.

  Something about Miss Grey was different.

  Her stillness had changed. Gav couldn’t have said how. Maybe it was just that she was standing under the lamp, interrupting its pool of bleached light like a rock jutting from the sea. He was more used to seeing her at the edge of things.

  He remembered a word she’d said to him: Come.

  It occurred to him that he had a choice. He could, if he wanted, go back inside, shut the blind and head up to his makeshift bed. That was the sort of thing he’d been doing recently when she showed up. She was easy enough to ignore when he set his heart on it, or at least she had been until she’d started climbing in trains and shouting in his ear. Still, he could close the door on her if he liked. Shut her out like a vagrant. It was in his power.

  But if he didn’t do that, if he went out into the road to join her, he’d be doing what she’d told him to do. Come. He’d be giving in.

  He looked around. It was past midnight. His parents weren’t even in the country. He was in a village he couldn’t name, hundreds of miles from home, standing on the doorstep of a house full of singing masks that belonged to a woman he barely knew, a woman who’d rescued him from a place where he’d been locked up in the dark with a monster.

  It was fairly obviously time to stop trying to know better than Miss Grey.

  Even that name felt stupid for her now. A childish joke. No name felt right, he thought, as he wriggled around Hester’s car into the silent road. She looked like she was beyond names.

  ‘Gawain,’ she said.

  Confused, he stopped in the lane. He hadn’t expected her to talk. She never talked. She wasn’t the kind of person who spoke in that kind of voice, a normal talking voice.

  The sound of her speech was peaceful and certain as old stone.

  ‘You left a door open behind you,’ she said.

  He turned round dumbly, saw Hester’s front door half open, then turned back.

  ‘Take off your shoes.’

  He was in the middle of the road, ten paces from her. Another indeterminate pause and then she stepped towards him, her cloak rustling over the tarmac. Small bare feet poked from under it. He saw the tight set of her mouth, the familiar gaunt, faraway face, the unfathomable eyes. The worn white light and the perfect darkness all around drained her of any colour. When she was close enough to touch, she pushed back the cloak and knelt down by his feet.

  She undid his shoes. Velcro crackled.

  She lifted each foot in turn and slid the shoe off. Then, one after the other, she held his feet up and pulled off the socks. Her fingers were deft, unhurried, their touch slightly warm. She put the shoes and socks aside, carefully, laid her hands gently on his two feet and held them for a moment, as if confirming they were bare. As she leaned back to sit on her heels, she looked up at his face. The tumble of hair over her cheeks fell open.

  ‘Don’t put them on again. Let the earth hold you up.’

  He might have nodded, or whispered ‘OK,’ or neither. He was too entirely lost to know. Time itself seemed to fall into the darkness of her gaze and be held motionless there. His heartbeat sounded like a distant echo in his ears.

  ‘I . . .’ he began. It seemed like he ought to say something. ‘I . . . um . . .’ He looked up and down the street. No one and nothing moved. His own stammering words sounded absurdly small, lost in the night. What was he even doing trying to talk to this . . . this thing? This phantom, this mistake? She rose to her feet again.

  There was a difference in her eyes too. They were less like a wild bird’s. A person was looking back at him.

  ‘I thought you were . . .’

  She waited. Her stillness was inhuman.

  ‘Gone,’ he finished.

  ‘I am gone,’ she said, in that voice dark with age. ‘Through the door you left open walks my end.’

  He stared, mouth half open.

  ‘Will you take my burden from me, afterwards?’

  In the desert of his thoughts he stumbled across a fragment of something the Corbo beast had said. Old mad witch. She seemed so calm, but she was just the same as on the train after all. A malfunctioning mouth.

  To his astonishment she slipped her hands out from her cloak and closed them over his. They were dry, knuckly. She took a step closer, raising their hands between them, fingers knotted.

  ‘Gawain,’ she said. He was amazed at the warmth of her. She was so small and frayed he thought she’d be as insubstantial as cobwebs. She had never touched him before, except in dreams. ‘You are free to choose. We all are, though the road-goad watches the road. Will you take my burden from me?’

  He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t look away from her. He was coming unmoored. ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘The name your mother gave you.’

  It was the way she always said it, in his dreams, but he’d never heard it aloud before, clear
in the cold air. Every word she said made him feel like he was hearing language for the first time.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  Her fingers tightened over his. ‘Nor I,’ she said. ‘Will you take it and let me go free?’

  His answer came to his tongue unexpectedly, a complete surprise, although as soon as he said it, he knew it was true. ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  She turned her head to the side and lay it on his chest, next to where their hands were intertwined. All he could now see of her face was her nose sticking out of the tangle of hair. He felt her head rise and sink with his breathing.

  ‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘your end?’

  ‘Who can answer that?’ Her head nestled against him. ‘It is the mark I cannot see beyond. I’ve lived so long, Gawain. So long.’

  Old old old.

  ‘What’s happening?’ The question dropped of its own accord from the block of his bewilderment, a fragment calving from a glacier.

  ‘This,’ she said. ‘And then the next. And so it goes on, next and next and next, all down the endless road. You’ll see.’

  ‘See what?’ All he seemed to be able to do was echo her.

  ‘Everything,’ she answered. She looked up. ‘That is the burden. Will you bear it?’

  Because her face was so close, the face he knew better than any other in the world, and also because he remembered at that exact instant that it was the face he loved better than any other in the world, the fact that she’d asked him a question four times finally sunk in, and so he answered it.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘All right. Yes.’

  A silent change rippled through her. Her eyes closed, her lips opened slightly to release a breath – he saw all these details with perfect clarity; he remembered every tiny motion, even years later – and, as if the warmth of sunrise had just fallen on her, she gave a barely perceptible shiver of relief.

  ‘Um . . .’ he began, as she leaned her head on his chest again. Now he was afraid she was going to go to sleep. He pictured himself stuck there till morning. People would come out of their houses and find him standing there in the middle of the street with no shoes on, propping up an old mad sleeping non-existent witch. ‘What burden?’