Advent

  The cold didn’t sting as bitterly as it had. Now it spread through him like an embrace. Don’t go to sleep, he told himself. You weren’t supposed to go to sleep; that was bad. You got too cold, you went to sleep, you never woke up. Gone, like Miss Grey. Don’t go to sleep. He wiggled feebly in the seat. The weight of his eyelids was unbearable. Don’t go to sleep. The sibilant murmur of the word was like a lullaby hush. Don’t sleep, sleep.

  Less than half a mile away, Owen Jeffrey sat alone in the front pew of a village church, staring at the altar. The church was quiet.

  It was always quiet. Even when he conducted the parish mass here every other Sunday, even when it was warmed by its dogged complement of the faithful echoing the responses and singing the hymns with their slightly embarrassed conviction, there was an underlying silence that wouldn’t be shaken. All these old country churches had it. It was packed in among the timbers of their ceilings; it seeped out of their memorial tablets and bell towers and lady chapels. It was a thousand times deeper and more persistent than any congregation’s reflex devotions. Nothing dented it: no children’s services, no support group meetings, no midnight masses or Advent carols. The silence flowed back and drowned them.

  The silence of the missing voice, it was. The absent ghost haunting every church. The silence that listened to their hymns and liturgies and prayers and entreaties, and answered – nothing. Nothing, ever.

  It sang in Owen’s ears. There’s no one here. There’s never been anyone here. The church is empty, the altar deserted. There will be no reply. No one’s coming.

  No one was going to answer him. Not even today.

  He’d been alternately sitting and kneeling there all morning, since before the snow. The clock above had struck ten, eleven, twelve. No sign yet, not even a still small voice. No light from above.

  He’d entered the church in brilliant sunshine. Now it was twilight-dim inside and the wind hummed around the tower. He ought to be getting going, he thought, though it wasn’t clear where, or why.

  He’d very much hoped that someone would tell him what to do now that the end of the world had arrived. But God was keeping his counsel, same as always. Everything else had changed, but not that.

  Or maybe he’d already had all the instructions he was going to get. They’d been clear enough. Unmistakable, delivered by that exquisite voice, and painfully simple.

  Go. Do not return.

  Was that it? Was that all he needed to know, at the end of the world? Just to get out of the way?

  Of course – Owen closed his eyes and shivered – that wasn’t all he’d heard. Before he’d reached the gate, before it had seen him and turned to him and told him to leave, he’d heard the singing.

  His lips opened and he chanted in a small cracked voice:

  Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum.

  Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum.

  He wanted to recall the music of the chant as he’d heard it that morning, carolling over the sunlit fields like a blessing. It was like trying to remember a dream of flying.

  That was when he’d known the end of the world had come. When he’d heard a voice no human creature could possess, singing the Advent antiphon inside the gates of Pendurra. Really there’d been no need to go any further, no need to look in at the gate and see the . . . the creature planted by the lodge.

  He knew the song, of course. He’d warbled it himself in his services just that Sunday. The Advent invocation, pleading for the descent of heaven to earth.

  Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

  Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

  And here were the heavens falling, the sky pouring down its relentless embrace. Owen looked out of tall windows and saw the torrent of snow.

  That’s the justice we’ve earned, he thought. Cold, silent, deadly.

  Same as always.

  He stood up wearily and made his way back to the door.

  ‘Still nothing to say for yourself, eh?’ His voice came with the faintest stony echo, as it did when he delivered his sermons. He’d come to think of it as the sound of the church swallowing his words, the way it had swallowed generations and centuries of sermons before him, absorbing all their pieties into granite. ‘Not a word? Nothing? Not even today?’

  The night before, he’d been assailed by a fragment of the darkness, whirring like a storm and croaking like a death rattle. And then in the morning, in the sunlight, when he’d finally plucked up courage to go back to Pendurra, he’d passed his wrecked car, turned in the gate and seen . . .

  The end of the world.

  No more than a mile up the road there was a thing eight feet tall with arms and legs of knotted wood and an evergreen face and a voice of liquid gold.

  It had looked at him. It spoke to him. It told him to go away. And still God wouldn’t answer his prayers. Not so much as a shuffle of His feet or a clearing of His throat.

  He sighed and headed for the door. There was no point praying any longer. ‘All right, then. Have it your way.’

  Outside, the storm assailed him. No letters of fire were appearing in the heavens. No grim horsemen rode by, thundering out the good or bad news. The dead stayed safely tucked up in their coffins. Judgement was descending as obscure and characterless as the snow.

  One more try, he thought. He’d head up there one more time. Tristram and Marina and Caleb and Gwen were his friends, after all. He wasn’t sure how much that mattered any more. But what else was there to hold on to?

  Rorate coeli desuper. He hummed it to himself breathlessly. Et nubes pluant iustum. He went home for his coat and scarf and wellies, and then back out to endure the falling sky.

  Gawain dreamed of a forest.

  It was a huge, airy, mossy forest of cedar and hemlock and ferns, lush with the moisture of a grey ocean nearby. The smell was of ankle-deep pockets of pine needles and rotting bark, gathered in the hollows of lichen-spotted boulders. At first, in his dream, he had not himself been in the forest, observing it instead as if it was a picture. Then, gradually, it gathered him in. He grew aware of its clouds of mosquitoes, its damp air, its undergrowth of saplings striving for light. Then he was trying to pass through it, out to the shore. There was a strong and disturbing feeling of familiarity, which grew and grew until it seemed to be the whole point of the dream, and he heard himself saying out loud, ‘Is this where I came from?’ He knew it couldn’t be so, because of the tall straight trees and the nearby ocean, but nevertheless he shouted out the question in fear. Miss Grey answered him: It’s where you’re going. He was tremendously relieved to hear her voice in his dreams again, because for some reason he’d been afraid she was dead. He couldn’t see her, though, so he began searching through the forest. He came out onto a long strand of smooth round pebbles beside an ocean inlet, littered with bleached dead wood, and there she was, sitting on the stones, her back to him. In the dream he thought how strange it was to see her somewhere so unlike anywhere he had been before. The name of the place came to him: Tsaxis. He came over the shore towards her, but now it wasn’t her after all. It wasn’t even a dream; it was an actual woman sitting on a real shore, the shore of Tsaxis, looking out seawards. She turned when he called. She was a young Eskimo woman in a furred hood. Miss Grey had said her last goodbye.

  He woke up thinking he was still stranded on that shore, with the cold of the ocean all around him. He was a boulder, curved and hard. He wondered where the ocean girl was. She could turn him back to flesh.

  The ocean girl was far away. He felt strongly that he needed to find her. Only when that feeling came over him, carrying its charge of urgency, did he wake up properly. He jerked upright in the seat of the car, looking around in confusion for the thing that was missing. Gradually he remembered where he was, alone in the cold little box of blue-grey light.

  Alone.

  He sat still for twenty seconds, piecing together what he thought he rem
embered, filtering out the vivid intensity of the dream, making quite sure that he was right about the fact that there should have been someone with him. Then he turned round slowly and looked into the back seat.

  Horace was gone.

  Twenty-six

  The woman who was no woman leaned on her staff, pulled her strange garments tighter around her strange skin and looked down pensively at the other woman, the one who was dead.

  Snow had all but submerged the corpse. Only one stiff arm stuck out, rigid fingers open, the hand that had taken the ring mockingly empty.

  The wind had calmed in the last few minutes. Snow fell thinly and perfectly straight. Still, the woman who was no woman would rather have waited inside the house. Her clothes were inadequate to the winter, though in the absence of the wind the cold had abated. But she could not bear any more waiting.

  She faced the snow and shouted a word.

  ‘Corbo!’

  Around the edge of the garden, trees crooked black fingers at the invisible sky. She scanned them, brushing smears of wet hair away from her eyes, until the shadow appeared. It angled towards her, growing huge, and landed, raising puffs of snow to glitter on its feathered thighs.

  Foul as it was, the woman felt a horrible lurch of envy. It swept along the air with such dark grace, where her own flesh was cumbersome and weak. It eyed her, head swivelling. She thought she detected resentment in the animal gaze.

  ‘Acknowledge me,’ she commanded.

  ‘Master.’

  She swallowed, cleared her throat. When she had been a man, it had never occurred to her that speaking was an action of muscles and flesh, like walking. The woman’s voice was as hard for her to use as the woman’s limbs. She loathed the sound of it. A woman’s voice. How could that be suited to command? (Johannes, turn. She shivered, but not with cold, and thrust the memory away.)

  ‘You have not found the thief, then.’

  ‘No no.’

  ‘One child, alone in this storm, and you cannot find him.’

  ‘Never saw.’

  The woman lurched closer to where Corbo stood. ‘You try to evade me again, puka.’

  ‘No no.’

  ‘You do. Your tongue is as filthy as the rest of the flesh I gave you.’

  ‘Hungry.’

  ‘Do you think I care for your carrion appetites?’ It ruffled feathers, loosening a white dusting from its impenetrable black. She thrust her chin angrily toward it. ‘If I have no use for you, I will let you starve.’

  ‘Wraaak,’ it cawed, bobbing its head.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  ‘There are torments worse than hunger, puka. I can summon them with a word.’ She brandished her staff as she made the threat. ‘Answer me without evasion, plainly. Where is the boy who fled here with the witch’s ring?’

  ‘Never saw. Saw track.’

  ‘His track in the snow?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  ‘So you know where he has fled?’

  ‘Out. Past gate.’

  ‘Then why did you not pursue?’

  ‘In box.’

  ‘Box?’ she echoed, before she could stop herself.

  ‘Big box. Dead thing. Track to it. Not past.’

  She straightened her shoulders as best she could. She would not allow her confusion to show. ‘Why do you not watch this . . . this box?’

  ‘You called.’

  Most of all she hated its voice, the inflectionless grating croak that always sounded as if it hid contempt. She regretted having conjured such a thing into existence. But she had been alone and helpless, ignorant as a newborn, her staff not yet recalled from the sea; the mistake was pardonable.

  ‘You watched it until I called? Just these last minutes?’

  ‘Cold. Cruel wind. Long watch.’

  ‘And saw nothing?’

  ‘Nothing in. Nothing out. Only snow, kkraaaa.’

  ‘Then why—’ She pressed her lips closed, swallowed, coughed. She must not ask weak questions, as though she were helpless without it and the dryad. She must not let it think that. Know that.

  She began again, choosing her question carefully. ‘What of my familiar?’

  ‘Stuck,’ it said.

  She shook snowflakes from the lank tangle of her hair. The beast stared back at her, passionless. Stuck?

  ‘Repeat yourself.’

  ‘Stuck.’

  ‘Explain yourself!’

  ‘Stuck. Can’t go.’

  ‘The familiar?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  ‘What has halted it?’

  ‘Holly.’

  ‘What?’ she blurted. Her foolish woman’s mouth. She bit her lip, anger rising, as it repeated its answer.

  ‘Holly.’ As though she were deaf, or stupid.

  ‘You tell me the dryad has . . .’

  Impeded her. Betrayed her. She could scarcely believe it. She would have suspected the puka of some trick, but it was not capable of lying, and both question and answer had been without ambiguity. She stared at it with loathing.

  These abortions. These spirits forced, at her will, through the passage she commanded, by the virtue of the ring, into substantial flesh; these miscreations whose only reason for existence was to do her bidding, how had they so much as conceived of defiance, let alone dared to defy her?

  ‘Where,’ she croaked, ‘is the dryad?’

  ‘Gate.’

  It had been a bad mistake. Awaking from death, in a dark chamber of a dying world, she had reached out with the power of the ring and acted on an impulse of fear instead of wisdom. The servants she had conjured were poorly chosen. Puka and dryad, lesser spirits, mere exhalations of the crude earth. They should have been as far beneath the notice of the greatest magus in the world as the filth of a midden. She should have left them insubstantial.

  It was past time to show them what obedience meant.

  ‘Follow,’ she ordered. The puka ought to witness what she would do. When the ring had been recovered from the Cathay brat, there would be ample time to look around and choose her attendants more wisely. And meanwhile the familiar at least would obey, as that fiery spirit always had, bound to the staff she had summoned back from the seabed. Though it had found flesh without her knowledge or her choosing, it was the same spirit and served her still. It had dedicated itself to her service long ago. It had not even named its payment.

  (Unaccountably, she shuddered. Corbo let out a soft rattle behind her, krkrkrrr.)

  The crow-beast stalked behind her as she staggered to the woods. Perhaps she should have ordered the old man to clear a path through the snow, but he appeared even feebler than she was, good for nothing but slumping in his chair with his dead eyes, only animated when he wept for the girl he called his daughter or appealed to the once-woman with a name that was not now hers and pleaded for things she could not understand. She struggled along until she gained the cover of the trees. There the way became somewhat easier and she could raise her head and stride more purposefully up towards the gate, or at least as purposefully as her woman’s flesh allowed. The puka’s silence behind her was like a laugh behind a raised hand.

  She thought, I must regain the ring. Only let me be the keeper of the doorway to the eternally living realm and all obstructions will melt away as easily as these snowflakes on the back of my hand.

  But as she ploughed through the deeper snow towards the house by the gate, the sight and sound she met there drove all assurance away.

  The sound came first, a muffled thrashing and a stifled rolling growl like faraway thunder. She saw the gruesome outline of the form the dryad inhabited, one of its limbs pressed to the whitened ground. Beneath that limb writhed a snarling black blur.

  ‘Stuck,’ Corbo explained behind her, unnecessarily. ‘Strong arm.’

  The woman who was no woman was for a few moments speechless and motionless with astonished rage.

  ‘A boy,’ the dryad sang out. She heard it easily though it was f
acing away. ‘A small boy, and out of his way. Your beast bared its teeth, Master. Must more necks be broken?’

  Its wheedling unlocked the anger that had frozen her tongue. ‘Release it!’ she screeched. At once the limb curled up and the black dog sprang out of its cavity in the snow like shot from an arquebus, scattering white spray.

  ‘Master—’

  ‘Do not speak! Do not move! I forbid—’ She gagged on her fury and bent, coughing. The dog let out a brutish growl, shaking snow from its head. Its legs sank deep. It came to her in short leaps. She gathered her breath, almost as furious at the weakness that left her spluttering and crouching in front of these inferior things as she was at their treachery. Her familiar twisted its sleek muscled bulk around her legs, flame like drops of orange quicksilver spilling from its mouth and leaving dark stains in the snow.

  ‘Saved a life,’ Corbo muttered.

  She turned to it, slowly. Her breath was racing.

  ‘What do you know,’ she began, ‘of human life?’

  ‘Short,’ it began. ‘Hungry—’

  ‘Silence!’

  The beak-mouth snapped shut.

  It deserved nothing from her except commands, yet she could not help herself. She spoke slowly, tightly, her shoulders shaking. ‘You.’ She pointed a thin finger at the puka, then jabbed it at the dryad behind. ‘You . . . creatures. Are nothing. Dirt. In the great order of creation you stand scant rungs above mere vacuum. I raised you. I gave you body.’ The finger curled to her own chest, where the ring had hung. ‘I did! I gave you mouth and limbs. I elevated you to substance and speech. You may not—’ Her voice rose to a horrible squawk; she choked it, forcing herself to maintain the dignity of a master before his servants. ‘You may not question me. You may not judge what I do, nor presume to speak of life to me. Silence!’ The jutting mouth had opened. ‘Listen!’