Advent

  Gathering herself, she approached the dryad through the churned snow. Its two long limbs trembled and flexed, then swung suddenly, so fast that Corbo shuffled back with a startled caw. But they could not strike the once-woman. They swept up at her sides and came to rest above, barbed shadows against the sky.

  ‘A mere boy.’ Holly’s whisper might have melted ice. ‘An innocent.’

  The woman who was no woman had expected wheedling and pleading. Long experience had taught her how such beings would beg for the things they had forfeited, or avoid the things they promised. She was becoming colder by the minute. She had no time for it.

  She spoke the word that named the dryad, which she had learned as she wore the ring on her finger, and would not now forget. The tree wavered as if the earth it stood in had quaked.

  ‘Hear your punishment.’ She hated her tongue’s clumsiness. Her man’s mouth would have delivered the judgement with august finality. She sounded instead like a cackling witch in a stroller’s play. ‘I gave you those arms and that mouth. You used them to defy me.’

  ‘Holly hauled down the hunter. Never you said—’

  ‘Be still!’ It came out as a bark. By what corruption of the natural order did this mannequin think it had the right to argue with its maker? ‘You know the familiar serves me. You were not free to let the boy escape it. I will remind you of it for ever. You will not leave the spot where you chose insurrection. Your roots sink, now, and fasten you here.’ Holly quivered again, stretched its neck up, the mouth working in silent agony. ‘You will see, and speak, and raise your abominable limbs to the heavens. The earth will feed this body I gave you. You will live for ever within it and never move. You will remain always what you are now.’

  A long, bitter groan came from behind her, kraaaaa. The sentence enacted, she turned to go.

  Holly’s voice rang out at her back.

  ‘As will you, man-woman, as will you. The unsuckled breasts. The blood in the bed. The itch in the loins, the itch! Do you feel it, man-woman? Does the tender flesh there flame with it?’

  Fury exploded within her, so hot it almost made her blind. She spun round, but her clumsiness betrayed her, and she slipped and fell face down in the snow, landing at Corbo’s feet. Panting, she pushed herself to her knees, trying to shake the long hair away from her face. Wet snow plastered it to her cheeks and eyes. It clogged her mouth; she spat and coughed. Intolerable humiliation thickened her tongue. She couldn’t speak the command to silence Holly’s mockery. It sang on as she struggled to her feet.

  ‘Woman unknit all your wards. Woman woke your talisman. Woman found the mirror of your vanity, where your old soul hid. Woman welcomed it, warlock. Are you not grateful?’

  She managed at last to paw the stringy hair off her lips. ‘Silence!’ she tried to shout, but it came out as a choked squeal. She felt her temples throbbing as she limped towards it, leaning heavily on her staff. She wet her lips, reached her free hand out and held it in front of the green face, spreading her fingers.

  ‘It is,’ she began, deliberately slowly to prevent herself screaming like a harridan, ‘a woman’s hand.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘It did not understand what it did, when it unsealed the great enchantment by which I overcame death. It was ignorant. Weak, reckless. This whole world has fallen into ignorance and decrepitude.’ She leaned closer, her breath hissing between clenched teeth. She knew she ought not to waste words on the dryad, but fury boiled inside her and spilled out.

  ‘Since I woke in it I have heard the sky roar with a noise like a thousand furnaces. I have seen the near horizon lit at night as though hellmouth were open beneath it. I have seen comets riding the lower sky. They pulse like hearts. Monstrous leviathans rear misshapen backs above the waves. The air itself is tainted. This world is a stinking marsh. Its woods and fields are shorn of life as if the plague had visited them. I thought only the wisest and worthiest master of the latter days would be able to find what I safeguarded. Yes, it was this woman instead.’ She waved her hand in front of the green face. ‘A mere woman. Mock me for it, then.’ She could not stop her voice rising. ‘Mock this hand, but it still masters you.’ She clenched her open palm into a fist. ‘Taunt and rail as you will, you will never stir an inch from this place, and the spirit that you are will rant and weep in its wooden prison until the world itself is gathered for the last judgement. You will have time enough to remember my power. The world may have forgotten it, but my art endures.’ She lowered her fist, her rage cooling. ‘I am its master, and yours.’

  The dryad had not moved. Pleased at having quelled its insubordination, she was beginning to regain her proper magisterial calm when Holly spoke again and shattered it.

  ‘Not so.’

  Raw with cold, her hands began to shake. She thought she must have misheard, and before she could control herself, she grunted out, ‘What?’ like the dullest apprentice.

  ‘Not so. It is not so.’

  The world was mad. She must not have awoken in the true world at all; that was the only explanation. She was in some degraded copy of it, blemished by incomprehensible sounds and sights and lifeless simulacra of living things, a purgatory of lost virtues and decayed powers. A place where lesser spirits contradicted their master. That it had been capable of disobedience at all was startling enough, but she put that down to her own pardonable carelessness. She had known nothing of what was around her, barely even known herself, when she had bound it and the puka to serve her, to protect her from her ignorance of the place and time to which she had come. But to hear it speak against her from its own mouth . . . She was so astounded that she almost forgot to be enraged.

  There was another thing, a thing she could not forget; but she refused to remember it, she would not even entertain the thought. The spirits cannot lie. She would not think of that. She would not.

  ‘Not your master?’ Her voice quaked with the effort of not shrieking. ‘Move, then, if you can. Strike me. Drag yourself out of the earth I have fixed you in. Let us see whether I command you or not.’

  ‘You mistook your mastery. It is not yours.’

  Tchok-tchok, muttered Corbo, behind. The magus was frozen with sudden doubt. It cannot lie, it cannot lie.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was horrified to hear her mouth say the words. What was this spirit, to be interrogated by such as her? ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Mistaken, mistaken,’ it sang, sounding gleeful. ‘It flees you, Master.’

  ‘The ring?’ She blurted it out like a threatened child. ‘Answer! Do you speak of the ring?’

  The silhouette moved at last, limbs twisting and waving like a pair of giant serpents coiling over her. ‘Holly sings the beggar’s ring, the living gift, the stolen thing.’ And it was indeed a kind of song, a threnody of sweet despair. ‘Holly saw it come to light, but stolen still, still unrequite.’ It swayed towards her and she shrank back, fearing that it would topple, but its roots were deep. ‘Another owns it now, by right.’

  The chill had eaten inside her. It cannot lie. Now it touched her heart. She felt as if her soul had withered again to a hand’s breadth of cold metal.

  ‘It is mine,’ she said in a halting whisper. ‘No other is worthy of such a talisman. It was offered to me and I accepted it.’

  ‘Not! So!’ Holly’s voice pealed with triumph.

  To be interrupted was more than she could bear. Her scream of inarticulate fury silenced the dryad. Meeting its vermilion eyes, she began to croak the spell that would send her fiery minions like an insatiable flame inside the living heartwood and make the dryad suffer the torment of damned souls. But her borrowed mouth betrayed her. Gagging on her own words, she choked like a slaughtered animal, struggling for breath, bending double, clutching her staff for support. As she tottered in the snow, the picture of her utter humiliation suddenly shone clear to her. She saw herself, a stumbling, gaping, bedraggled, female wreck, an object of scorn to her own servants. The rage shrivelled into despair.

  Miserably, she thought:
I must learn what it knows. I must endure its taunting. So begins my penitence for what I had to do.

  She was spared the shame of having to ask the dryad to explain itself. While she hauled herself straight, wiping the dirty hair away from her face, Holly spoke again, now in a gentle murmur.

  ‘The gift passed to another, Master. Today, as the bells struck twelve. A new day begins. You it was, Master, who made the old day dark. You broke your word and you broke your world. But now the stolen gift belongs to a boy-child. Kin of the flesh you bear. Did you not know him when you saw him?’

  ‘Stupid boy,’ Corbo added.

  Defeated, unable to muster any answer at all, the magus stared at the mocking green face.

  In her mind’s eye she was seeing again the body in the snow. Had she ended the prophetess’s inconceivably ancient existence for nothing? She remembered how she had loved her with a man’s body, a man’s love: the splendour of it, the marvel. The magus had never shrunk from the endless pursuit of knowledge, nor ever feared to take any step that led higher into the regions of hidden wisdom, no matter what the cost; but surely she had never done a greater and more awful thing than casting down her once-beloved. Could it really be possible that she had been somehow thwarted?

  And yet, she thought with a shudder, the spirit cannot lie.

  ‘The ward,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘You mean the ward, the ward of . . .’

  ‘The ward of her your hunter slew. The boy, a sister’s son, a simpleton.’

  Her anger and her humiliation had spent themselves together. Something worse was taking hold now. A cold, dull feeling, murderous as a blade.

  ‘Where is this boy now?’ The abomination appeared to hesitate. ‘Answer!’

  ‘Can’t say,’ croaked the dark voice behind. ‘Don’t know.’

  She turned carefully. Corbo looked back at her sidelong.

  ‘The boy you allowed to go from the well,’ she said. Slowly she was beginning to grasp the depth of the disobedience these vile miscreations had practised. ‘Though you knew I wished him kept there.’ She turned back to Holly and pointed her staff. ‘The boy I commanded you to watch for and bring to me, though you brought another child instead, the Cathay brat whom I left for dead.’ Thwarted, thwarted by children and monsters. Oh, how they would all suffer. ‘The brat who stole the ring and fled from here, with your help.’ The chill inside her hardened into determination. ‘This is the boy you mean?’

  Neither of them answered.

  ‘Speak. Is that the boy to whom you say the talisman’s power has passed?’

  ‘No power,’ Corbo said, and at the same time Holly began reproachfully, ‘Only truth lives in the tree-tongue. Holly—’

  ‘Answer, slave! Is that the boy you spoke of? Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes yes,’ Corbo echoed, fluffing its folded wings.

  She gazed at the hideous things she had made until the cold made her eyes water. Deep inside, she was wondering where exactly everything had gone wrong, and how it had come to this, but those thoughts were buried like leaves at the bottom of a frozen pond.

  ‘Then,’ she said at last, ‘I will destroy him too.’

  Snow fell placidly around them.

  ‘More necks,’ Corbo muttered.

  ‘Yes.’ She rounded on it. ‘Yes, puka. More necks will be broken. Man or woman or child. They will die in the snow and be left for carrion like the witch. Perhaps you will tear their flesh yourself, if I permit you to eat. Or perhaps I will starve you until this loathsome flesh you wear withers and rots. You and all others who obstruct me will learn what it is to oppose me. Do you understand?’

  ‘No no,’ muttered the puka.

  ‘No,’ hummed the dryad.

  She rode over their soft answers as if they had not spoken. ‘I alone can bring life back to the world. I alone. I will not be denied. I will not.’

  The black dog had made its way to the entrance of the lodge, among the splintered remains of Guinivere Clifton’s front door. It broke the silence that followed the once-woman’s speech, raising its head and spitting out a bark.

  She turned to it with relief. She still did not know how the fiery spirit had found this dire form to wear. There was a magic in it she did not recognise, something ancient, earthbound and godless, dark as the northern forests, reeking of death. But she saw that the familiar obeyed her in its new flesh. Without prevarication or hesitation, it followed her will. That was her only concern now. That, she saw, was the essence of magic: mastery. Nothing mattered in the end but command and submission.

  The dog was nosing around the wreckage inside the house. There was something there, a black satchel strangely marked. Growling, the dog lunged as though it had spotted a rat. It came up with a piece of fabric in its jaws. Foggy with the aftermath of her fury, the once-woman took a while to understand what it had found.

  ‘Puka.’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  She gestured towards the dog. ‘Is that a garment?’

  ‘Blue thing.’

  ‘Yes! Is it a garment?’

  ‘Yes yes.’

  The dog dropped the shirt it had snatched from Gav’s bag, which was still right where he’d dropped it the first time he’d entered the house, just inside the doorway. It sniffed at it, then stepped over the bag and leaned out of the house, swaying, tasting the air.

  ‘To whom does it belong?’

  ‘Stupid boy.’

  ‘What? Answer clearly!’

  ‘Boy. Ward. What Holly said.’

  The woman gripped her staff and took a moment to compose herself. Her lips felt rigid with cold and despair. When she was sure she could trust her woman’s mouth, she spoke the beast’s name, the word that named the black puka she had conjured into the bird. With brutal pleasure she felt it pulled into her grip, as if the syllables were a cord she had jerked tight round its neck.

  ‘Fly,’ she ordered. ‘Go at once. Search again for each boy, the thief and the ward. Do not touch the earth or anything that grows in it until you can bring me news that you have seen one child or the other, or until you are called. Keep searching even if you must fly until your flesh starves.’ She turned away. ‘Go.’

  She heard the rustle, and then the great thuds as its unfolded wings battered the air, quickly fading high and to her right.

  Holly keened softly, so she addressed it next.

  ‘Be silent,’ she said. The gentle groan died instantly. ‘After I leave you here, you will not open your lips in my presence again. Not another word. Not another sound.’ She did not even look at it. ‘Acknowledge it.’

  ‘Master,’ Holly whispered.

  Last, she turned to the dog.

  ‘Pursue the boy who stole the ring. The Cathay boy. Find him first.’

  ‘Small boy,’ Holly murmured. ‘Wrong boy. A sapling merely. Ignorant, innocent.’

  The woman did not even trouble herself with its complaint. She went on as if its words were no more than perfumed air. ‘Bring me back the talisman. Then you may pursue this other scent.’ The dog stabbed its muzzle at Gawain’s shirt, pawed the cloth. ‘Hunt it. Kill it.’

  Holly wailed wordlessly. The woman who was no woman raised her voice to drown it out.

  ‘I will not,’ she said, ‘be denied.’

  Twenty-seven

  All around the river, things had come to a stop.

  To the west and north, snowploughs were out on the main roads. Trails of headlights crawled along behind them. People stuttered and slid their way indoors. Below, in the valleys that twisted down to the river’s sheltered creekheads, the blizzard was impassable. Vehicles had been abandoned. Livestock knelt with their heads down, waiting for the grass to come back.

  Surely, everyone thought, it wouldn’t stay like this much longer, although no one had predicted it and for some reason the weather people weren’t able to say when they thought it would stop. In fact they didn’t seem to be able to say anything about it at all, other than talking about a ‘freak stor
m’, as if that turned their bafflement into expert assessment. In the house neighbouring the Jias’s, Myrtle Pascoe tutted as she and the nice man from the newspaper listened to the latest bulletin on the wireless.

  ‘Well now, that isn’t much help is it?’ he said, in his pleasant Irish brogue, as she switched off the set. (For Myrtle Pascoe, any Irish accent was a ‘pleasant Irish brogue’, the same way any country vicar was a ‘dear old thing’ and any three-year-old a ‘cheeky little monkey’.)

  He sipped the extraordinarily weak tea she’d provided him, marvelling at the speed with which its tepid warmth radiated out through the paper-thin china, leaving the drink with the overall character of a half-hour-old bath run from a rusty tap.

  ‘Looks like I might have to book myself into the Red Lion for the night.’ They’d have coffee at the pub, he thought. In mugs. He’d have to quarry some kind of story out of the trip so the paper would let him expense it, of course. But even if the mad prof next door wouldn’t talk to him, he’d have no trouble coming up with something. Weather emergencies were always reliable that way. Come to that, if this old biddy kept going as she was, he wouldn’t even have to get his shoes wet. It felt like she’d already told him the life stories of half the people in the village. He’d covered six pages of his notebook in doodles while she banged on.

  ‘Dear, oh dear,’ she twittered, leaning forward in her chair. ‘Oh goodness me. Look at it coming down. There’ll be dreadful trouble on the roads. Oh I do wish Hester would get back. She had hardly a stitch on when she went out this morning. I mean,’ she added hurriedly, ‘not for this weather anyway, though it was fine this morning, wasn’t it. That’s what’s so peculiar. Glorious. They said it was going to be fine all day, I’m quite sure. I listened to the early bulletin. I don’t always sleep as well as I used to, you see, Mr Moss . . .’

  Take cover, he thought. Here comes the stream of feckin’ consciousness again.

  ‘. . . It’s one of those things when you get old like me . . .’