Advent

  Alas, Marina had known very little fear and stress in her thirteen hidden years. Being pulled so hard in so many directions was too much for her. She sank to her knees in the shallows, whimpering, clinging with one wet fist to the hem of Gawain’s trousers, squeezing her eyes shut. He knew he ought to kick her away, do anything to get her out into the icy river, but she was holding on to him as if he was the last tether stopping her from sinking, and he couldn’t do it. Her desperate grip anchored him; all he could do was watch as the mermaid and the warlock approached, one from the shore, one from the sea.

  Swanny beckoned urgently as she rose higher. Gawain could feel what it cost her to come so far up into the air. Unlike when she’d leaped into Horace’s boat, or when fifteen years before she’d seen Tristram walking by this very cove in moonlight, the ring was not nearby, and without the passage it opened she could not be truly a woman rather than the sea-image of one. She dropped to a crawl and forced herself up the strand, straining the fingers of one hand towards her terrified child. Her mouth was working, but the watery whisper Gawain remembered was inaudible against the clamour of the crows on the far bank. She mouthed her child’s name. Marina couldn’t hear or see it; head bent, hands over her face, she moaned wordlessly to herself, over and over again.

  ‘Go on,’ Gav begged her. ‘Please. It’s her. Please go.’

  The mermaid’s hand, trembling, stretched out and touched her cheek.

  Marina stopped shuddering and opened her eyes. Her skin remembered the mother’s touch, perhaps. The memory worked its way gradually inwards, towards her heart.

  Above them, on the beach, the warlock steadied herself, raised her staff to her lips and spoke three words. The spell was barely more than a laboured whisper, but Gawain heard it and recoiled in dread. To his ears the words carved through the air like stones from a sling, and in the passage they made he felt fiery presences thronging. The glow at the end of her staff blazed up. She raised it with both hands and pointed it down towards where the mermaid and her daughter knelt together in ankle-deep water.

  Swanny twisted and stiffened as if struck by lightning. She fell on her back, her head tossed up on the sand. Her legs thrashed in the shallows.

  ‘Mummy!’ Marina screamed. ‘Mummy!’ She clung to the shuddering white shoulders. Swanny’s arms tried to curl over the child, but the agony gripped them again and they pounded on the sand. She was drowning in air, while the invisible tormentors pinned and racked her.

  Gawain’s head was buzzing. Everything was a chaos of noise. The distant cawing, shouts from the trees, the girl’s anguished cries, the air thrumming and burning, his own desperate rage. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted, not knowing which part of the cacophony he wanted silent. He couldn’t think. ‘Stop it!’ That was it: he had to stop her. Consumed with horror and fury, he forgot to be afraid. ‘Stop!’ He gripped the rowan stick so hard it hurt his numbed hands and started up the beach. He didn’t see his aunt any more. No one could have. The merciless bitterness in the warlock’s face had transformed it. He saw only a thin hunched woman who had no power over him. He yelled and broke into a run, raising the stick over his head.

  A whirring shadow swamped the last light. Vast black wings swooped over Gawain’s head. Then Corbo was standing in front of him, blocking his way.

  The horrible broken voice behind it said, ‘Kill the boy.’

  Gawain stared into its obsidian eyes.

  The hooked mouth opened.

  Kaaaark

  ‘Corbo?’

  It took a step forward. Its talons raked deep marks in the sand.

  ‘Run,’ it said.

  A gurgling, choking sound had begun behind him. Swanny fought to speak, while the tide ebbed further from her. Marina sobbed over her dying mother, shouting and crying all at once, her hands looking for some part of the pale wet flesh to hold.

  ‘Let me past, Corbo,’ Gawain said, as steadily as he could.

  ‘Not now. Told to kill. Run.’

  The crow-thing stepped closer again, then suddenly threw back its head and screeched. ‘Run. Run. Run run run.’

  It came at him, a blur of wings and claws. Gawain swung the walking stick reflexively. A fast and angry blow might have hurt it, but he’d never learned to fight. Corbo swayed away from the rowan staff with implausible grace, wings spreading, and lifted itself into the air. One foot swept out and clutched the stick, and with the next huge thrust of the wings wrenched it out of Gawain’s grasp. He stumbled backwards, hands stinging. ‘Run run,’ Corbo cawed again, neck stretching. It dropped the stick and landed, hopping closer. ‘Run. Dive.’ Gawain scrambled back into the water. ‘Go, wraaaaak. Go.’ It bounced forward and beat the great wings again. Its talons flashed out with grotesque speed. He flung himself to one side, landed with salt water drenching his face, righted himself, spluttering and gasping. He was quite certain now that he was going to die, but, unbearably, that certainty was less tormenting than the girl’s pitiful cries and her mother’s final agony, the knowledge that he’d failed them.

  Corbo alit on the shore, balancing itself. Beside it the mermaid shivered weakly, her thrashing reduced to spasmodic quivers. The glimpse of Marina’s grief-struck face shredded Gawain’s heart.

  ‘Kill him now!’ another voice shrieked. ‘Now!’

  Even Corbo’s expressionless cries sounded like a roar of misery. ‘Rrraaaak,’ it groaned. ‘Flee, flee, wraaaa.’ It launched itself, wings pounding air, gaining purchase, rising.

  Gawain pushed himself upright, splashed three steps towards the open river and threw himself down as the hideous shadow spread over him and plummeted. This time he felt talons tearing his back. His mouth filled, drowning his scream. Salt burned in the wounds as if the claws had stuck to him and were burrowing down to his bones. He thrust his head up to gulp air and howl in torment. The whole twilit scene began to swim and blur. Hazily, he saw the monstrous bird rising above him again, screeching as bitterly as he was, preparing to lunge. He saw the warlock hobbling out onto exposed rocks that jutted out into the falling tide, looking for a better view while her servant tore him apart. Scrabbling desperately against the muddy seabed, he took a huge breath and shoved himself down, the sky darkening above him again as Corbo swooped.

  The water seemed to embrace him, not dense and sluggish but easy as air; he slipped right down to the submerged rock, shaping himself low and flat like a diving cormorant. There was a bubbling commotion on the surface above, and maybe the plunging claws didn’t reach him, though the torture of the open wounds in his back was so fierce he could feel nothing else there anyway. Through eyes misting with grief and pain he saw the impenetrable murk ahead, the weed-covered depths where the drowned valley sank away below the lowest tides. It seemed like a peaceful, mercifully silent darkness, like death. He swam down towards it, kicking.

  The water dimmed and then swirled again, with a strangely inert sound. Gawain rolled as he swam and, looking upwards, saw small whirlpools where Corbo’s claws had pierced the surface and withdrawn. Ribbons of blood fanned out in the agitated water. He kicked up quickly. His head broke into air and he found himself screaming; when the pain had emptied his lungs he gasped to refill them. The warlock had picked her way out to a shelf of kelp-draped rock far out from the shore. She stood as if on a tiny island, as far as she could go, on the brink of deep water, pointing to where Gawain had surfaced, shouting something in a voice as harsh and almost as inhuman as Corbo’s racking cries. Above, the wings beat, wheeled, tipped as it plunged once more.

  He twisted to dive. His back felt like it must have broken. He couldn’t tell whether the darkness gathering around his vision was the falling shadow above or the silted mud below or the coming night or just his own life bleeding out of him. He sank, welcoming the bite of the cold. It damped the fire in his gouged back. He was shrinking inside himself. Soon he’d contract to nothing. The splash of Corbo’s feet scything through the surface above sounded dull, almost gentle. He was down among the swaying weeds, where every
thing was slow and placid. Only his lungs were still protesting, burning as the last draught of air expired. They would calm too, once he filled them with water. Everything would go quiet. Quiet as Miss Grey.

  He felt the deep, enduring plenitude, above and beneath. His memory filled with her goodbye kiss. The last kiss, she’d told him. Earth and sky had opened as her lips touched his, the world going on without her, without him.

  There was a hum in the water.

  It was a deep, wonderful sound, a homecoming sound. It rushed towards him, joyfully swift. His consciousness of things fading, beaten down and completely spent at long last, Gawain ceased his struggle and let it come for him. He sank slowly as it swelled closer. For a strangely blissful moment it drowned out the agony in his back and the crushing weight on his lungs, and he knew it; he remembered its hymn of blood and sustenance, the song of the untrammelled ocean. He remembered its name: ma’chinu’ch, ma’chinu’ch. He opened his throat to welcome it. In the darkness of the water he saw the singer, a huge slick blackness surging towards him as if the sea itself had taken flesh.

  A great welling current in the river came ahead of it like a second tide. It thrust him up. Noise and chaos returned in a rush as his head came out. There was Corbo, wheeling high above, cawing its grim cry. He’d surfaced far out from the shore and the winged beast had lost track of him for the moment. Through the sting of salt and the sparks of pain in his eyes he saw the warlock still perched at the extremity of her low spur of rock, bending forward, scanning the river.

  ‘There!’ she shouted. ‘There!’ She stretched out her staff towards him. ‘Finish him!’ Corbo was already pitching down, a black bolt from the sullen clouds.

  The surface of the river trembled, then roiled, and then light and darkness breached it and surged up, massive and swift and irresistible.

  Corbo screeched, but now it was shouting the name of the thing that had leaped from the water: ‘Orca! Orca!’ A whale, black-backed and white-bellied, a slick titanic bullet cannoned from the river, so swift that Gawain only saw it for the second of its deadly arc through the air. But that second was long enough for it to sweep alongside the isthmus of rock where the warlock stood. The glancing blow of its fin tossed her up like winnowed chaff.

  Talons rushed at Gawain’s face. He lifted his arms weakly and sank straight back down to the silence below. He didn’t see his aunt’s body crash into the water, limp as a sack, or the warlock’s staff bobbing away, already in the grip of the seaward tide. He didn’t see Corbo’s wings snap stiff, carrying the suddenly quiet crow-beast away in a long glide. All he saw was the featureless dark expanse stretching away from him, and himself fading into it, ebbing, vanishing oceanwards.

  He sank slowly, his last strength gone.

  Then he was rising again. He felt himself lifted, but was past knowing or caring how, though there might have been white arms. He was flotsam.

  He came to the surface. The sky was barren and peaceful as the depths. Water dribbled from his nose and mouth.

  Something washed him up on the coarse sand. He lay there, belly down, up to his chest in the icy river, a piece of sodden driftwood. Fragments of shells pricked his cheek. He tasted blood and seawater.

  Slow feet scrunched down the beach. Wheezing breath accompanied them. Gawain didn’t think to try and move his head to see who it was. He felt peacefully insensible, like a stone.

  ‘Oh my love,’ said the voice that went with the wheezing and the footsteps. ‘Oh God. Oh my dear love.’

  From somewhere beyond his feet another voice whispered very softly ‘Fetch him water.’

  This struck Gawain as a wonderful idea. He noticed how unbearably thirsty he was. The salt in his mouth made it feel like it was being scoured and baked.

  ‘From the well.’ If everything else hadn’t been so quiet all of a sudden, he doubted he’d have heard the rippling whisper. No one moved.

  ‘Marina,’ said the same voice.

  More scrunching, and he heard Marina now, sounding very trembly and very young.

  ‘Where’s . . . What happened to—’

  ‘The warlock is broken. You’re safe now. The well, quickly, or the boy will die.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. Sorry.’ Poor Marina, Gawain thought distantly. Always does as she’s told. ‘I’ll go.’ Her steps started away hesitantly at first, then sped into a run and were silenced as she clambered up to snow-covered ground.

  He hoped she’d hurry. Dying didn’t seem too bad now that he was three-quarters of the way there already, but he was really desperate for that drink.

  The voice beyond his feet whispered something so quietly that only a ghost like him could have heard it.

  ‘Go safely. My heart. My second heart. Be always safe.’

  Shoes appeared in his line of sight. Wet brown shoes, with wet brown trouser cuffs above them. He would have had to turn his neck to see more, and he had the vague feeling that any attempt to move would start a volcanic eruption of pain in his back, but he didn’t need to bother, since he’d figured out that this was Tristram Uren. Something about the shoes. Funny the things you notice, he thought.

  ‘Swanny. Oh God, Swanny. Oh thank God. Thank God.’

  Now he couldn’t hear what she said. It was obscured by the sound of Tristram’s feet shuffling into the water, and his hoarse gasp at the cold.

  ‘I can’t let you go again,’ he said. ‘Not again. Oh, Swanny. This has to be the end.’

  He must have stopped splashing around, because this time he heard her. ‘Then come to me. Quickly, before she returns.’

  The steps struggled further into the water, halted.

  ‘How can we leave her? Oh my love, my love!’ Between joy and grief his voice cracked apart.

  ‘I watched her for these many years. I will watch her still. And the boy is kind, and brave.’

  I wonder what boy she’s talking about, Gawain thought.

  ‘Eleven years.’ Tristram’s whisper was almost as soft as the mermaid’s. ‘There hasn’t been a single minute when I didn’t think of you. Not one.’ His voice rose. ‘Not one. Swanny, Swanny! God forgive me, this is all I ever wanted. To be yours again. To die happy.’

  Dictionary definition, another ghost said in Gawain’s head, hazily. A state of rapture, supposedly inspired in men by nymphs. Hence, a frenzy of emotion inspired by something unattainable. He remembered stories. Odysseus and the sirens. When sailors saw mermaids they’d throw themselves into the sea and drown.

  ‘I’m here,’ Swanny said. ‘Come now. If our child sees you go, her heart will break.’

  Gawain felt something trickle along his nose. It was a tear. He hoped it would drip into his mouth.

  ‘Tell her—’ Tristram began, and his heavy breath choked. ‘Tell her—’ he tried again. He made a small noise that might have been clearing his throat.

  ‘Tell her . . . she has been the light in my life all these years. Tell her I couldn’t have borne losing her mother again. No more than she could have borne it herself. Tell her I love her more than . . . more than . . .’

  The mermaid’s whisper broke the silence, remote as a wisp of mountain cloud. ‘Come and love me.’

  The shoes and trousers went further into the river and out of Gawain’s sight. He had gone back to contemplating the bleached shards of shell in front of his eyes when it slowly occurred to him that Tristram’s last words had probably been addressed to him. Wait a minute, he thought. Tell her what? Tell who? Why?

  There was some agitation about the question that broke through his dullness. It suddenly seemed important to see what was going on. With enormous effort, he inched his chin a little closer to his shoulder, angling his head just enough to look down past his own slumped body and out into the river. It took nearly as much effort to get his eyes to focus. There was an awful, throbbing pain. He’d somehow managed to avoid noticing it before, but now it interfered, making his eyes water and fill with shooting stars. He squinted through them.

  The mermaid was waist
deep in the river, arms out, a luminous smile on her glistening face. Tristram Uren, his hair white as winter, waded out towards her through the shallows. She seemed to glide back a little as he approached, and a little further again, until it looked as if he might stumble and sink before he reached her embrace. Then in one joyous movement she surged forward, clasping him, lifting both of them up. They held each other as tight as if they had grown together, she the white column and he the clinging vine, and it seemed to Gawain’s imperfect sight that they shone for a moment as they kissed, the sheen of water catching whatever final radiance the expiring day had to give them. Then they sank together and the river settled over them. After that there was nothing to see.

  Part VII

  Omens

  Thirty-two

  For the first time the greatest magus in the world knew what it truly meant to face death.

  Her ribs had cracked when the whale struck up at her, and all the breath had been driven from her body when she fell to the river, and her clothes, filled with freezing water, weighed on her like the chains of the condemned, but none of the agonies of the body even began to compare to the livid terror of knowing she would now die. She’d drowned once before, but now there was no enchanted microcosm of her soul given in immortal safekeeping, no assurance with which to defy the hideous indifference of the sea. This was the end, the unthinkable terminus.

  And beyond the end, judgement waited.

  No plumb could have sounded the depths of horror the magus knew in those few stretched seconds of her drowning as the prospect of a final reckoning opened before her. Johann Faust had thought himself one of the holiest of men. He had been the devoted and selfless servant of wisdom, that most precious of virtues. He had reverenced the fingerprints left by the Maker’s hand. Even when he was wrecked with the English mariners in the guise of Master John Fiste, and sunk to his first death, the horrible animal fear and solitude of drowning had been warmed by a comforting conscience; for although he had already then dreamed of stealing immortality for himself, he had – the certainty of it was bedrock under the tossing storm – done no harm. Had that been the day of his true death, he would have gone down among the cursing sailors like a prince among peasants, calmly enduring the brutality of the waves for what it was, a mere instant of suffering before an endless journey into glory.