Advent

  Maybe it will protect you.

  Under his jumper he curled the fourth finger of his left hand alongside the slender silver chain and slipped it into the ring.

  The crows stirred on the roof, ruffling out their feathers and shivering. Horace

  heard their harsh excited chatter, felt the forty pairs of glassy eyes on him, knew their eager thought. He heard the wind sough around them, heavy with approaching snow, threaded through with the influence of the hidden stars. He heard the caged and buried winter earth mumble in its half-sleep, ground bass to the whole concord of the coming twilight

  He stood up.

  There were other voices. Nearer. Single voices, together making a deep turbulent murmur. He wasn’t alone any more. He was in company.

  Come in, they said. The door is open.

  The boy turned the handle of Hester Lightfoot’s front door and swung it inwards. The slow-moving throng of voices spread around him. Behind its tightly closed blinds the room was almost dark, but that was all right. He stepped inside, among the masks, bearing the open door.

  By a light that was not the grey remnant of the winter afternoon he saw the speakers of the voices. One of them seemed to single itself out and turn to him. It addressed him.

  Water-child.

  The sound of its unspoken words was deep, placid, without echo.

  Bring me home. Take my way.

  At once the boy knew the way it meant: a great, endless, open expanse, in which a tender and beautiful light was suspended, azure-gold above, indigo below; vast and free. His heart leaped at it. He strove to answer the invitation, seeking the one that had offered it. It turned to him, and

  ma’chinu’ch

  in the darkness he saw its oval-eyed, high-snouted wooden face, every curve and line the shape of an ocean wave.

  Home.

  Gawain sat with his legs outside the car. The letter lay open on the seat behind him. He stared out across a wide white emptiness.

  The glow of Owen’s phone on the dashboard was growing luminous. It was beginning to get dark.

  Time to go home, he thought.

  But before that there was one last goodbye to deal with.

  His fingers were unsteady as he reached for the phone, though that might not have been because of the cold.

  Each of the many times he’d fantasised about this moment, he’d rehearsed a quick, gleeful, perhaps even vengeful goodbye, succinct as a punch. Now that the time had actually come, he wasn’t sure what to say.

  He dialled the number, listened to the message, waited for the beep.

  ‘Mum, Dad. It’s . . .’ He couldn’t use the name they’d given him, but he didn’t want to say the true one. ‘Me.’ He stopped, listening to the phone’s soft echoing hiss, wondering if it was the sound of the hundreds of miles through which his voice was travelling, dissolved and beamed through the air, reassembled as a spectral sound in an empty house, a speaking machine. ‘Nigel and Iz, I mean. Not Mum and Dad.’ He felt the vindictive bitterness rising and swallowed it down. ‘So. I found out who I am. Or at least who I’m not.’ A few more seconds of the ghostly hiss. ‘Anyway. Mum, you’ll be the one who hears this. Don’t worry about me, OK? I’ll come and find you someday.’ These words astonished him. He’d only meant to tell them that he was never coming home. ‘It may be a while. Just try not to worry, OK?’

  He started to picture his mother listening to this message, dialling in from some crappy anonymous hotel in whatever ski resort it was, like she’d probably been doing every hour she could get away from Dad, getting more and more anxious as yesterday passed without a word from him, and most of today, and now listening to this, her relief at finally getting a message turning so quickly into bafflement and shock and then a permanent hurt.

  ‘You’ll soon see why I left. Everyone will. You won’t understand it, but . . .’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Anyway. Forget that. Just remember what I said, OK? I’m not coming back, but one day I’ll find you. OK? OK Mum.’ But he wasn’t talking to Mum. He was talking to an artefact of plastic and circuitry. She wasn’t his mother, anyway. She was his mother’s twin sister; his mother was dead. Her grave was far to the east. The sun rises on your mother’s grave. Miss Grey never lied, never. It was just that he’d never believed her.

  ‘OK, bye then.’ He took a breath, then said the word more gently, with care. ‘Bye.’

  When he brought the phone round to look for the button that would hang it up, he saw that its bland light had begun to dim of its own accord. The numbers faded. The little screen went dark. It had gone dead in his grip. He prodded some of the keys to make sure, but there was nothing in them. It had always been dead; it had just taken a minute to accept the truth from his hands.

  There’d be no calling for help. There was no connection. The last tether anchoring him to his old life had been slipped. He tossed the phone onto the floor of the ruined car, down with Horace’s keys and other bits and pieces, rags and junk, possessions and accessories and detritus, the graveyard of things.

  On his way back to Mrs Pascoe’s house to retrieve his notebook, this is what J.P. saw:

  The sky came suddenly alive with a welter of black birds, swarming together. The air shuddered with massed wing-beats. Under their shadow a small thing with legs and arms and a huge misshapen empty-eyed head was disgorged from one of the houses and came barrelling out into the lane, flurries of snow sheeting up around its feet. It paused in the middle of the road, monstrous head swaying, long enough for everything J.P. thought he was sure of in the world to dissolve, and then it crouched and loped away.

  Then all he saw was a village lane in deep snow. When he looked around himself to check that the world was still standing as it had a moment before, he noticed a disapproving elderly face peering at him from a window.

  His feet were damp. J.P. tried to remember why he was standing there, the cold of the grave crawling up from his legs.

  After a while it struck him that he probably ought to do something.

  He thought about going back to the pub. His room was all arranged. The radiator clanked and the back of the cupboard smelled of piss. Could be worse. A few more drinks and a night’s sleep and in the morning he could start again. Tomorrow is another day.

  But he knew, all of a sudden, that there’d be no sleep for him that night, and he knew that tomorrow would be nothing like today, nothing like yesterday, nothing like all the days he’d known up until that one. Not unless he turned on his phone and discovered that the picture was gone and in fact had never been there at all. Not until he could persuade himself that his own eyes hadn’t seen what had just appeared in the street, right here, right in front of him.

  He tried the second tactic. (The first hadn’t been working very well, all afternoon long.) He walked up to where the thing had appeared and studied the snow.

  There were footprints. They were small, a child’s, and deep. They were fresh. He knelt down and touched the delicate rim of flakes at their edges, feeling the tiny stings of cold on his fingertips.

  The footprints came out of the crazy woman’s house. He looked across and saw its door swinging open.

  It would have been easier to bear if it hadn’t been for those prints. Then maybe he’d have blamed it on the pint he’d had with his lunch, or maybe the other one, or the stress of work, or a trick of the light. But there they were, neat, clear, deeper at the toes to show someone was running, perfect hollows of shadow in the silk ribbon of the lane. They stretched out ahead of him like an invitation.

  ‘Ah Christ,’ he muttered aloud. ‘You’re going to regret this, J.P.’

  He balled his hands in his pockets and set off in reluctant pursuit.

  On a white page, Gawain was a speck of spilled ink. The cold had penetrated him so deeply it had become an irrelevance. He went barefoot through the snow, keeping his eyes mostly on the sky. The birds had abandoned it. Eastwards, ahead of him, its murk faded to iron-grey. Dusk was coming.

  He wonder
ed whether his mother had walked down this same road, fifteen years, a month and fourteen days ago, carrying him, bleeding. He wondered what had driven her into the woods. He wondered what she’d known, what she’d hoped for.

  He ought to have been afraid, but he wasn’t. He thought about that too. It occurred to him that the perpetual swamp of low-level fear in which he’d passed his life for almost as long as he could remember was, when you got down to it, the fear of being wrong, of having his incurable galloping wrongness exposed to the world. Now that was gone. Terrifying as Holly was, as the hell-dog was, terrifying as was his utter ignorance in the face of whatever he was heading towards, none of them were as frightening as the old habitual fear that he’d accidentally made it all up.

  But he wasn’t wrong. It was the rest of the world that had been in error, all this time. Who’d have thought?

  He wasn’t even Mum and Dad’s child. He’d never been that person.

  Gawain. The name your mother gave you. Miss Grey never lied. It was his parents who lied. No, not his parents. Nigel and Isabel whose name they all had to pretend wasn’t really Iseult. Fifteen years of lying. Fifteen years of trying to force on him the difference between what was real and what wasn’t, and all the time having it exactly backwards.

  The landscape was utterly transformed. Snow lay over it like another language. It might have been starting again from nothing, like him.

  A faint sound occurred, drifting from the east. Gav stopped to listen. When he held his breath, the sound became the only noise in the whole white world. It rose and fell, suspension and cadence.

  Holly, singing. In the wintry desertion the sound of it was like the promise of warmth, so beautiful Gav found himself blinking away tears. He strode on as best he could until he was near enough the gate to make out the words of the carol.

  Now the holly bears a berry as blood is it red

  Then trust we our Saviour who rose from the dead

  And Mary bore Jesus Christ our Saviour for to be

  And the first tree in the greenwood it was the holly

  Holly, holly

  And the first tree in the greenwood it was the holly

  When he came to the entrance the song stopped. The thin rails of the iron fence stuck out of the snow, marking the line of the driveway as it curved down into the screen of trees. Their branches were black and motionless as the iron. To the left was what had three days earlier been Aunt Gwen’s house. In the barren monochrome the thing outside the ruined door stood out like a desert flower, burnished green studded with its two pairs of blood-red circles.

  Gawain went in, under the gaze of the red eyes.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ he said, when he was almost close enough for the limbs to swing out and crush him. ‘That was beautiful.’

  The head inclined, loosening a breath of snow. When it spoke, Gawain felt a peculiar stab of joy.

  ‘You hear, then? Men have ears, after all?’

  Smiling foolishly, he spread his arms, indicating the surrounding silence. ‘Couldn’t really miss it.’

  ‘I warned and am ignored. Why, White Hawk? I bid you run, yet here you are again.’

  Gawain glanced around, but the landscape was perfectly, immaculately still. ‘This is my home,’ he said. ‘I don’t belong anywhere else.’

  The tree-woman’s bulk stirred, a colossal statue coming alive.

  ‘Your death is commanded.’

  He made himself remember that he wasn’t afraid of it any more. ‘You’re going to kill me, then?’

  ‘Not I. Not I.’ Its limbs flexed, descended. He stood his ground as they circled behind him. ‘But the hunter has your scent. Your path is marked.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, more bravely than he felt. ‘I’ll just have to hurry up.’

  ‘He will break you. Rake and rip and leave you to rot. He—’

  ‘Yeah, I get the idea.’

  ‘Then get you gone.’

  Gawain shrugged and shook his head. His decision was made. Like he’d said to Owen, there was a thing he had to do. Now that everything else in his life was gone, it didn’t even feel brave, or complicated, or surprising. It was just all there was.

  ‘I’m going to find Marina.’

  ‘You will find murder.’

  ‘You’re not much help, you know.’

  ‘Help?’ It managed to fill the one syllable with bitter laughter and tender grief all at once. ‘Holly, help? I am haled here, cleaved to this tree, and my roots riven earthwards. I am weaker than a word of yours. Do you believe it? A day-old boy-child is a greater thing than Holly. Did not your kind make ghosts of us merely by forgetting? Am I not less than a trick of your thought?’

  He shrugged again and glanced towards the darkening horizon. ‘I have no idea, to be honest. I don’t know what you are. I’m just going to try and find my friend.’

  ‘The changeling child.’

  Gawain remembered standing in shock at the door of the chapel, hearing the dry rustling voice. The girl, a changeling. The boy, an orphan, and ward of her you seek. Perfectly simple, though even then – even just yesterday – he hadn’t been able to so much as take in the words.

  ‘Holly?’ He tried to meet its look, tried to talk to it the way he’d have talked to anyone. ‘What does that mean, “changeling”?’

  Holly swayed sinuously, impossibly graceful. ‘Ah, May Hawk. I would tell you tales, had we time. I would sing you stories. Fairy-children, cradle-theft. Ballads of the otherborn. You would lean on my trunk through the night and listen. But your trail grows warmer. You would never see the dawn.’ It bent closer, shaking its head. ‘Nor will you see dusk, if you tarry. Go, boy, before you are found. Go.’

  There was a powerful temptation to make it talk again. While he had its attention, nothing seemed to matter except keeping it. He forced himself to notice the gathering dark. ‘Can you at least tell me where she is?’

  ‘The half-girl?’

  ‘Marina, yeah.’

  The limbs spun lazily outwards. ‘Holly sees only this. Little enough. The child went in and never came out.’

  In the silence that followed Gawain stared into the pupilless red eyes. Their impassive stillness was like a repetition of the word. Never.

  ‘Went in where,’ he said.

  ‘My master’s dwelling. Take your way elsewhere.’

  ‘What do you mean, she didn’t come out?’

  ‘We are not men. What we say we mean. Now be gone.’

  ‘No. Listen.’ He breathed deeply. It could have meant anything, he told himself. Never. A voice so beautiful couldn’t have told him what for a stupid moment he thought it was telling him. ‘I have to go. I’m going to find her.’

  ‘Where my master dwells?’ Holly managed to sound amused and horrified at once. ‘You would hurry to your own massacre?’

  ‘You’ve really got a way with words, don’t you?’

  ‘It is all the ways I have, now.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I can’t go anywhere else either. I can’t run away any more.’ This was true; he fastened on the truth and tried to speak with more conviction. ‘I mean it. I just can’t.’

  ‘Is it so hard for men to live?’

  ‘Marina.’ An ocean girl tends it. ‘She’s got something I need.’

  Again the long humming exhalation, and now a shape like a smile bent the black lips. Its branch-arms lifted slowly.

  ‘Man’s desires,’ it sighed. ‘Mystery, mystery.’

  Gav felt himself blushing under his chapped and frozen skin. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Love and death.’ The gorgeous voice was a warm whisper. ‘Death and love. Man’s day-star and night-star. Your kind lives and dies and never learns which is which. You seek one here and will find the other.’

  ‘I’m not in love.’

  ‘Touch me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Touch me, White Hawk. Lay your hand on Holly.’

  You’re kidding, he was going to say, but didn’t. Instead he took two steps forwar
d, towards the ashy mottling on the bark of its limbs, the tiny caps of snow on the sleek berries of its nipples. He reached out his fingers to the green waist.

  ‘Mortal warmth,’ it whispered, somewhere just above.

  He let his hand spread over the surface. Cold and smooth. His fingers recognised the wood, the wild fecund holly. But he felt the other life as well, inside the tree, something belonging to a world or a way of being he’d always thought (or been told) he was only imagining, a life he had no word to describe.

  ‘You are not altogether the child I chased away.’ The part of it he touched moved a little. ‘Though your hand is a human hand still.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He felt absurdly uncomfortable about its breasts being at the level of his face. He stared fixedly at his fingers. ‘I think I figured some things out.’

  ‘Go on, then, White Hawk.’

  Reluctantly he withdrew his hand and stepped back. ‘I’m Gawain,’ he said, inexplicably shy.

  ‘White Hawk. Hawk of May. Live to see another day.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. Far enough away that he felt he could look up at its snow-crusted head again, he surprised himself by adding, ‘If I can figure out a way to release you, I will.’

  ‘Your will weighs nothing beside the warlock’s.’ Gawain twitched and looked around. ‘Pay Holly no heed. Go warily.’

  Warlock? All at once it seemed like a good idea to hurry up, before he decided to run away after all.

  ‘And the hunter will return. Do not be seen, once-boy. Do not be seen.’

  Thirty

  He hurried down towards the wood, not looking back until the trees closed around him. Holly’s jagged shape stood out against the skyline. He couldn’t tell whether it was still watching him.

  In the shelter of the wood the snow was thinner and he walked through it quickly, a cage of knotted shadows appearing to move with him. His first glimpse of the house brought him up short, heart racing, guts churning. Through bars of intervening branches he saw light in upper windows, the unsteady radiance of firelight. Its shimmer made the house look like it had half-open eyes, flickering across the garden, watching for him. The fear he’d been ignoring asserted itself with a vengeance, all in one sick rush. Holly had as good as told him he was going to his death. He squeezed against the bark of a tree and tried to get a grip on himself. Ridiculous, he thought to himself. This is stupid. There’s someone in there who can turn crows and trees into people and make dogs breathe fire. How am I supposed to face that? Turn round and go. Now.