Advent

  But now – she could not deny it to herself, even in her most desperate need – she had descended to cruelty.

  Unforgivable cruelty. The dryad locked for ever in its tomb of wood, the screaming boy bleeding in the water, the half-girl watching her own mother die. And – this was the sight that overwhelmed her mind’s eye, in those few seconds of wasted struggle – the beggar prophetess, the princess of Troy, the bearer of the gift of magic itself, lying with her neck broken like scythed stubble. She, the deepest marvel of the world; she, who had waited twice a thousand years for his love; she, flushed out and killed like a barn rat, and left unmourned in the snow.

  The magus knew, with the iron certainty that arrives as the ingenious subtleties of self-deception finally expire, that she was damned.

  Damned.

  And to compound the awful, absolute horror of this certainty, she knew – as surely no other mortal ever had, not the penitents nor the church doctors nor the raving visionaries – what damnation might mean. She knew some fraction of it: a drop from the unquenchable Phlegethon had already fallen in her cup. For the blank-eyed servant whose obedience she had won so long ago, the fiery phantom whom she had made her messenger and viceroy in the realms of spirit, was a being of the lower spheres. Not a demon, no. Not that. She could no more command demons than angels. But (how could she have denied it to herself all those years? How could she have been so seduced by its willingness to serve that she had never once asked herself what it truly was she had admitted to her company?) it was the most despised companion of demons, denizen of the outermost suburbs of Pandemonium. It ranked among the worms and the mayflies of hell.

  Hell’s great brass gates yawned open to receive her. Its welcome was prepared.

  So the great and fallen magus lamented as she sank to her death, the river darkness thicker around her inch by inch, foot by foot.

  Then the murk was lit as if by a burnished aurora. Hollow voices and lidless eyes thronged around her.

  You die the final death, Magister.

  Under the choking weight of the river, her eyes were twisted shut and her mouth open in a drowned scream.

  Give us flesh again, Magister. Give us body. Admit us and be saved.

  The gates were wide. She was on the very threshold. Her poor battered husk was empty of air.

  We have served you, Magister. Now accept us and live. Share our being.

  Better to die, the magus knew. Better to die. The judge was merciful. He had atoned for all sins. There might be forgiveness still, if she refused the last temptation and denied them.

  The final instant is here. Permit us to do you our last service. Give us your flesh and live with us.

  The magus had once, triumphantly, believed herself ready to assume immortality. She had let herself be touched by the prospect of something beyond life, love, death, something no longer part of the commonwealth of humanity. Once cursed by that desire, she could not surrender it. For all her wisdom, all the patience and study and humility to which she had once dedicated herself, she could not, in the end, bear to die.

  I accept, she said in her heart; and so, at the very last, Johann Faust sold his soul.

  The drenched and ruined body jerked, tensed, filled with strength. Eyes blazing underwater like the furnaces of a sunken city, it stretched out its limbs and swam powerfully away.

  Thirty-three

  Mother of God, J.P. thought, looking around the professor’s front room. No wonder she lost her feckin’ marbles.

  None of them could stop themselves from stealing glances over their shoulders at the faces on the walls, even as they pushed the furniture around and squeezed past each other and fussed over the business of getting lead-grey, semi-comatose Hester Lightfoot into her house. The masks quelled the useless hubbub of conflicting instructions that had been pouring out of the small crowd ever since it had assembled in answer to J.P.’s call for help. This at least was a relief. One of the women was close to hysteria herself, and between her wavering on the outskirts of a screaming fit and the others trying to shut her up while arguing over what to do with Hester, he thought he’d have been mad himself in another minute.

  If he wasn’t already.

  He’d be back in the pub right now, so help him, with a glass of something a lot stiffer than stout, were it not for the fact that other people had seen it too, watched it gliding along the sky. It. Come on now, J.P., you’re a journalist, make an effort. It. The black thing, the black flying thing, rising up before his own two eyes like death’s feckin’ messenger.

  It’s the end, he thought. It’s finally come. Who’d have thought? Turns out Ma was right after all, God rest her. Hands up everyone who’d guessed he should have paid more attention to Sister Beata and the feckin’ nuns. Some of it stuck in your head, mind. Some of the words had a way of getting in there and never coming out. The poetry of them. And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket.

  ‘Excuse me a sec.’ He left the others attending to Hester and went out to the front steps. She’d be all right now if she was going to be, the others would see to that, and he urgently needed to reduce his exposure to her version of interior decoration.

  It had started snowing again. Of course it had. The old Vikings had a name for it, he remembered. Fimbulwinter. The last winter, when the world got ready to die. Three unbroken years, was it supposed to last? Now that was just a story, though.

  Just a story.

  He wrestled the phone out of his pocket. The message from Vicky blinked up: bbc on line, want ur story.

  He stared at it for a long while.

  Well well well, he thought sardonically. My big break. In the right place at the right time. Just what every provincial hack dreams of: getting to do a report for the Beeb.

  He imagined how it would sound. The crisp, uncommitted, inoffensively regional voice of the studio anchor. ‘John Patrick Moss of the Western Cornishman sent us this report.’

  This report. What would he say? What would he tell the country, and the world? There was a BBC way of doing these things. Detached, wry, just a tad sceptical. Don’t worry, nation of Britain. Don’t worry, people beside your retro radios or in front of your shiny flat-screen televisions. Your man in the field won’t ask you to think anything you don’t want to think.

  He called in.

  ‘Vicky? J.P. . . . Not so great, since you ask, but— . . . Yes, of course. Now? . . . OK.’ He puffed a cloud of breath into the chill air. ‘No . . . What? . . . Is there a story?’ He tucked the phone closer to his chin. ‘Is there a feckin’ story? Is that what you’re asking me, Victoria dear?’ He let the silence stretch a little. ‘The end of the world. How’s that grab you, Vicky? Think it’ll do for the front page? . . . No. No, you listen to me. I’m here. No one else is going to get here until the weather changes, and that could be a while, eh?’ Three unbroken years. ‘I know what I’ve seen. And I’m not the only one. Put them through.’

  He heard beeps in the office and Vicky’s exasperated sigh before he hung up. He fiddled with the phone, blowing on his fingers. It rang again almost at once.

  The urban voice. Slightly bored. Techie. He imagined the bloke in his studio, surrounded by all the equipment. Probably finishing his shift. Coffee, the kind that came with extra adjectives, in a paper cup.

  ‘Yes, I’m ready,’ he said. ‘OK . . . Got it . . . Yes.’

  Silence. The machines were waiting to record him.

  Ah, feck it, he thought to himself. Like Ma used to say, always tell the truth; it’s the easiest thing to remember.

  He told the truth.

  Gawain had to hold her hand every step
of the way. If he let go even for a second, she stopped dead, as dead as when he’d first seen her, sleepwalking in the rain. But he held it gently this time and led her without hurrying. This was partly because she’d gone so numb he knew there was no point trying to make her speed up, and partly because it gave him more time to think of something to say.

  In his other hand he held the little wooden box with its tarnished silver clasp, which she’d used to bring him water from the chapel.

  The snow was falling again, countless millions of white silences descending. What was he supposed to say?

  In the first violence of her grief, once she’d at last understood what had happened, she’d clung to him with a stricken intensity to which he had no answer at all. He’d never seen what anguish like that did to a person before. She gripped him so tightly her nails made him bleed and yet she might as well have been a thousand miles away, so powerless was he to reach across the abysm of misery that separated them. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, she’d cried, again and again, until it stopped sounding like a word and became the scream of a gull. How could he answer that? And when at last the cries had emptied themselves and she’d shrivelled into a limp stillness that was if anything worse to witness than the paroxysms of grief, none of his clumsy words had touched her at all.

  ‘Marina.’ Nothing. ‘Come on then.’ Nothing. ‘Let’s get you warm, come on.’ Nothing. ‘Marina, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Nothing.

  The first time he’d set eyes on her he’d thought she was dead. It was a bad omen. She was getting colder. Dying from the inside out.

  So he’d lifted her to her feet then, thinking at least he should get her inside somewhere, out of the snow. The chapel was closest, but he couldn’t take her back there, not now, and anyway, she needed warmth. He could find something in the house, maybe. Some clothes. A fire.

  She’d stood up unprotestingly, face vacant. But now as she followed him along the paths under the trees again, mute as a beast of burden, Gawain admitted to himself that it wasn’t shelter she needed, or fire, or dry clothes, or even the attention of someone who knew what they were doing. What she needed was a speck of light in the emptiness, some tiny thing to hold on to. Something as small as a word, even.

  He stopped when they came out of the woods, at the bottom of the field below the house. Awkwardly, he put the box down and took her hand in both of his. Her eyes looked straight through him into nothing. It was almost full night now.

  ‘Marina.’

  Not a flicker. It was like trying to address a waxwork.

  ‘OK. Marina. Before he . . . Before your dad . . .’

  In the shadow of her face he thought he saw her eyes slide round and look at him, hopelessly.

  ‘Before he . . .’

  Tristram hadn’t known what to say either. How could he have? What last message could possibly be adequate to the pain he’d handed down to her? How could he even have dared open his mouth? Gawain wondered: maybe speech runs out where magic takes over. Maybe that’s what magic will turn out to be: the things we don’t have words for. And it’s just that there turns out to be so, so much more of that than we all thought.

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘Your dad told me to tell you something. Before he . . . went to your mum. He told me to tell you that . . .’ He swallowed, closed his eyes. It was just like he’d been doing all along since he got here: keeping going. No turning back. Just keep on. ‘That you kept him going. That he loved you so much, that you were everything to him. That without you he couldn’t have held on even as long as he did.’ Her lips trembled and opened. He knew what they were going to say: Stop. Stop torturing me. But he blundered on, wading through her misery like he’d forced his bare feet through the snow. ‘He couldn’t say it himself, because . . . He could never. Not face to face. He was stuck between . . . between . . .’ Her eyes glistened, then overflowed. Appallingly, her face stayed perfectly still as the fat tears coursed down, like a weeping statue, or a weeping corpse. ‘Marina, I’m so sorry. But I know. The thing is, he didn’t have a choice. It’s . . .’

  He grimaced, then let go of her hand and took her shoulders. Say the truth, he told himself. Just say it. Don’t try to hide it. Truth hurts. You’d think words would be the easy bit, the bit that didn’t need courage, but oh no, oh God no.

  ‘Marina, please. Listen. I lost my mum and dad too. Today. I didn’t even know who they were. I still don’t. All I know is they’re gone, I don’t have anyone either.’ She was weeping with her eyes wide open, completely silently, staring at him all the while. It was unbearable, but he had to go on. ‘It’s like you catch something. Or it catches you. And after that things just can’t keep going like they used to. That’s what I mean, there’s no choice. Your dad loved you so much, Marina, I know he did. But after . . .’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘This. After all this, he couldn’t go on living here, being your dad. Your mum too, I know she loves you.’ My second heart. The tears washed scars in the dirt and sand on her cheeks. ‘I know she’d do anything to just come and be your mum, if she could. But she can’t. It doesn’t matter how much she wants it. What we want doesn’t make any difference at all. I used to have my life too, Marina. I used to have somewhere to go and stuff to do. But after today all of that . . .’ He mimed releasing a handful of dust into the wind. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. All I know is, at least . . . at least . . .’ He swallowed thickly, tasting salt. ‘At least there’s two of us, Marina. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. At least—’

  He only stopped because she flung her arms round his neck. ‘Stay here for ever,’ she was saying, in a voice worn soft by grief. ‘Stay here with me for ever. Stay here.’ She buried her nose in the hollow of his shoulder. ‘Stay with me. For ever, for ever.’

  For a moment he had no idea what to do with his hands. They hung stupidly in the air. Then he folded them around her, with a tenderness no one had ever taught him.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and patted her hair gingerly. ‘OK. For ever.’

  Corbo flew until it was almost out of sight of land, tracking the demon in the water, but it dared not go on further. It gave up the chase with a despairing cry, wheeling low over the swell and turning back to the northwest, loathing each condemned wing-beat that propelled it back towards solid ground. Hunger might sink it before it got there. If it could not be free, it must feed the flesh it was shackled to. Already it felt itself weakening. Its wings wrestled with the air, hammered it instead of stroking it.

  There was death in the sky. Somewhere over land, things that were not alive rose up and flew, growling and roaring with dead voices. They had the smell that fouled the world, the poison-smoke smell. Corbo could not see them, but it feared their approach. Battling the agony of its craving, it flew faster, making for the shore and the sheltering woods.

  As it neared, it felt the rustle of a crow-thought. Meat!

  Spurred, it beat harder and rose as it crossed the cliffs, the upwelling air carrying it high. It glided noiselessly over the house. It saw the half-girl and the once-boy below. They embraced, a little shivering huddle of persistent life, and went in under the roof.

  Turning as it met the current of the southwest wind, it smelled its fellow prisoner Holly below. Her limbs stretched up. She sang out her greeting.

  Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum

  Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum

  From the canopy beyond the house came the sweet stench of the crow-thought, gathering strength as more birds arrived to share it. Now Corbo too found the scent of fresh death and rejoiced.

  Among the trees the chorus of crows drowned out Holly’s antiphon. From generation to generation the crow-mind had preserved its memories of the old feasting fields, tapestries of slaughter garlanded with smoke. In their roosts they hoarded dreams of their centuries of plenty, the long golden age when the earthbound had been too impatient to wait for death and killed each other instead, legions of them, in numbers that made a mo
ckery of burial. Now they smelled the crow-banquet coming again. A new wind was rising, rich with plenty. They called from valley to valley, spreading the word.

  They scattered as Corbo descended. The corpse was too fresh for them anyway. Their hunger was visionary; Corbo’s was urgent. It did not care about the coming feast. It ravened now. All it saw in its future was bondage to the misshapen body, its cravings, its ecstasies, its sufferings – that, and the labour of watching over the once-boy, who would need all its care, if the crow-thought saw the coming months and years rightly.

  But that could wait. It stamped down undergrowth with its splayed talons and bent over the body.

  Madness had descended on Caleb as a kind of mercy, numbing the torment of his thoughts. He had thrown off the last of his clothes as he crawled among the nettles and thorns. The winter night had judged him with kindness, quieting him slowly, inexorably, irrevocably, until he was silenced for good.

  Talons gripped and dug.

  When Corbo finally straightened itself, its hooked mouth was smeared and dripping, and its feet too were stained crimson. It was transformed: a horrific incarnation of the chough, the Cornish crow, black all over but for its red beak and legs, a blazon of night and fire and blood. The carrion birds cawed the chough’s name in welcome, Pyrrhocorax, Pyrrhocorax. Their grim revels shook the wood.

  On the other side of the world, across land and water, in a place once called Tsaxis, a teenage girl zipped her coat up higher and burrowed down under the blanket.

  She always slept with her coat on. When it got cold, like tonight, she put the hood up too. Its thick, furry trimming gave her a nice animal feeling, snuggling up to something warm while she went to sleep, like being a raccoon kit.