She ignored the call to dinner when it came, and the ward sister merely shrugged and relocked the door. However, some measureless time later when the constant rocking had become something like a narcotic, helping to keep at bay the despair which threatened every minute to overwhelm her, there came the click of the lock and Simpson stood in the opened door. It can’t be morning already, can it? She clutched at the bed clothes but the giant was at her side in two strides, his hard fingers digging into her upper arm as she was roughly dragged from the bed, then each wrist was trapped in turn while he probed her clenched fist with a horny tipped forefinger.
That evening’s session was the worst by far. Again and again the Doctor forced her to view scenes from her past as she remembered them, and each scene was torn, befouled, changed beyond recognition to the constant tale of degradation and poverty. She had remembered being loved, valued, praised and rewarded beyond the dreams of most of the Sisterhood; she saw herself mostly ignored, beaten when she was not, reduced to seeking friendship and company from any chance stray, from feral animals to humans nearly as warped and untrusting. At the end, beaten, she pleaded brokenly for him to stop, to let her look away from the bitter light of the dully glowing crystal.
‘So you renounce these false memories?’
She was too sunk into despair at first to register the odd choice of words, but then she blinked and said, ‘Renounce? Why . . . what do you mean?’
Her hesitation seemed to enrage him. ‘Renounce them! They never happened! You were never a Magi! You never rode a . . . It was all just a stupid fantasy! Go on, admit it!’ In the dim light of the consulting room, the purple glow of the crystal underlighting his features, he appeared like some sort of beast, crouching ominously, his eyes blind pools of darkness behind the thick lenses.
She buried her face in her hands, ‘I don’t know!’ she wailed. ‘How am I to know what is real anymore, or what is true and what isn’t?’
Dr Milson sighed. It sounded like frustration. As if regaining control after his momentary lapse, he spread his hands palm down on the desk and straightened in his chair. After a moment the office door opened and Simpson stepped in. ‘Take this . . . take the patient back to her room, George.’ the Doctor said. Then, to her, ‘We’ll continue this tomorrow, my dear. It appears we have a long way yet to go.’
Helpless in the giant’s iron grip, she allowed herself to be half marched, half dragged down the hall to her room. The click of the lock turning was like the final breaking of a frail cord holding her erect and she slumped down on the rumpled ill smelling sheets and burrowed beneath them like some hunted animal gone to earth.
Much later she opened her red-rimmed eyes wondering what had awakened her. It took a moment to register that the room had gone dark, the lighted panel in the ceiling that was never allowed to go out had failed. Her first reaction was fear that they would think she had done it and punish her, and then she heard the voice. It was soft and clear and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
Tabitha, it called. Listen to me. You must listen!
‘Go away,’ she said wearily. ‘You’re not real. I’m making you up.’
No! You must listen! I have found it, the portal he used to come here.
She rolled over and drew the stained pillow over her head. It made no difference, the voice was not muffled in the slightest. Of course, she told herself in near hysteria, it is inside my head, Dr Milson was right.
He must have given up a great deal of his power to enter this world, the voice was saying, even I can only be partly here and not for very long . . . but together we can defeat him, Tabitha! You must come to me now!
More than anything she longed to merge with the darkness and just be nothing any longer, and here was this cruel voice asking for her aid. She felt torn in two! It was beyond bearing and suddenly she sat up convulsively and dug her nails into the skin of her forehead, feeling the hot pain as a kind of exorcism as she screamed ‘Get out! Get out and leave me alone!’
With shocking suddenness the door of her room was thrust open and she was blinded by a shaft of light from a hand held torch. ‘Hey, shaddup in there, ya crazy old bitch, ’fore I come in and give ya somethin’ to yell about!’
She blinked and saw the bulky silhouette of one of the night guards, and behind him the dimly lit corridor. The impulse that drove her to her feet was not a thought, but an image of the roof: Twelve storeys up! No more voices, no more memories! No more anything! She came out of the dark room with blood trickling from the wounds in her scalp in a frantic rush that must have terrified the guard, who attempted to back up, tripped and fell headlong. She ran down the corridor, her bare feet slapping on the warped parquet, past the nurses’ station and toward the red light of the emergency exit. Behind her she heard surprised voices and from somewhere the clang of an alarm. She reached the emergency exit and threw herself against it with bruising force. Locked! The disappointment was unbearable and in desperation she tried again, banging with her clenched fist at the metal plate of the release and suddenly with a loud screech it gave and the door swung outward. She wasted no time trying to understand but leaped for the steps, taking them two at a time, hauling herself upward with a two handed grip on the metal banister.
The ward was on the top floor and at the end of two short flights of concrete steps was the steel door leading to the roof. Over the rasping of her breath, and the insistent clang of the alarm and the shouts from below, suddenly she heard the voice again, exulting: Yes, Tabitha, come to me! Together we can do it! Join your power to mine! It drove her to a frenzy and she bore down on the horizontal bar of the release with the last of her strength. There was a solid thunk as the mechanism locked in place but then with a brittle sounding snap of overstressed metal she fell forward as the heavy door swung open.
The cool night air chilled her sweaty body and the thin hospital gown billowed about her. She stumbled across the tar and gravel surface of the roof toward the raised edge, hearing behind her the voices of the staff as they gathered in a group at the door way. ‘How’d she done that? breakin’ the lock like that for crissake, it ain’t natural . . . look out, don’t go near her . . . call that new doctor, he’ll know what to do . . .’ but she paid no attention. She drew near to the edge of the parapet, gazing down at the moving lights of vehicles travelling in an orange tinted mist far below.
I am here, Tabitha. Here before you.
She looked, half blinded by the bright lights in the windows of the building opposite. Then it was if a dark mist rose to obscure them, and she seemed to see forming a vast winged shape, and in it two bright green points that were not the lights of the windows, but eyes, staring down at her as shadowy wings beat slowly.
Come, Tabitha. Come, Rider, mount and fly with me!
She looked down and saw the shadowy outline of the great forelimb, claws digging into the stone of the parapet, and she set her right foot upon it, feeling the cool scaly musculature beneath her bare toes. The tapering head bent forward, large green eyes with their slit pupils boring into hers, and she put out a tentative hand, grasping the sinuous arc of the long neck, and for a perilous instant she teetered on the brink, not knowing if this was Ixator the Windlord or an hallucination of her diseased mind, and found she did not care as she leaped forward and up.
Panting with the unaccustomed effort Dr Milson climbed the last flight and shouldered his way through the group of nurses and night orderlies who were standing in a disorganised mob at the roof exit. ‘She gone,’ said one in a tone already defensive, ‘Wan’t nothin’ we could do, Doctor.’
‘Go back to work,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll deal with your incompetence later.’
When they had all trooped sullenly back to the ward he walked slowly to the edge of the roof and looked down. There was nothing to be seen, of course, the lights reflecting off the gases emitted by the moving vehicles below created an orange glow that obscured detail at street level. He shook his head. Such a pity, he thought, we were so clos
e to a real breakthrough. He waited for the sounds of sirens to herald the finding of the shattered body, wondering at the delay. A world peopled by fools, came the thought. Hardly worth the effort it had cost to come here, but at least the great Lady Tabitha would no longer be alive to oppose his eventual victory. He shifted his shoulders in the tight fitting jacket, suddenly irritated at the constriction. What a relief it would be to assume his natural form after all this play-acting.
Just at that precise moment he heard a sound from overhead, like a muted rumble of thunder, and in what was to be the last conscious act of his life the Adversary raised his head to look upward.
KELPIE
Dara stood at the edge of the tarn and shivered. Mornings were cold this high, and the slight breeze seemed to come directly off the glacier where the sun was only just beginning to gild the edges of the ice. Behind her, without turning, she could sense the great stone bulk of the abbey, the window slits seeming to observe her indifferently. Before her stretched the dark waters of the tarn, the surface of which rippled slightly in the breeze which also stirred the folds of her novice’s robes about her bare feet. She reminded herself again that there was no time to waste. Any moment now she would be missed from her cell and the Sisters would be summoned to search for her.
The wind sent an exploratory gust, intimate as an icy paw caressing her bare leg, as if to remind her that the deep waters of the tarn would be far, far colder, and she felt her resolve start to crumble. What was she doing? Had she gone mad? For the sake of a vision glimpsed one moonlit night from the window of her cell, she was about to attempt something impossible, unheard of, armed with nothing but a crudely fashioned necklace of rough crystals and . . .
You have no choice. That other voice, coming from a part of her consciousness untouched by fear or uncertainty. The part of her that had known what had to be done when she glimpsed that unmistakable shape silvered in the moonlight that danced in countless sparkles across the jet surface of the tarn. There was only one escape possible from this horrible place, this prison, across the leagues and leagues of mountain trails that lay below, for should she somehow survive the journey alone and unaided even the village that had been her home would be no refuge.
Unnatural! Witch! Devil’s Get! The epithets, snarled and shouted and screamed from the familiar faces she had grown up with, still burned like the spittle and refuse that had been thrown at her as she was bound to the back of the pack mule with cords drawn cruelly tight, bound and helpless to be led away by her father, the Lord High Justice of the tiny village, led away to this place, the Abbey St Gobain, high in the mountains. A place for mad people, she lashed herself with the words, for freaks, for those who needed to be locked away lest their very presence corrupt and befoul the innocent.
For what? For what crime? They had not shrunk from her in horror when at six years of age she had pointed to a rocky outcrop and said ‘dig there’. Not when the fields were pale and cracked with prolonged drought and every well and spring had run dry. Not when, humouring her they had attacked the surface with pick and mandrel and when within a few minutes of digging the life-giving water had gushed forth. No, she had been their Miracle Child, the little Lady of the Waters. She had taken an innocent pleasure in the titles and the extravagant adulation, never suspecting how easily it could turn to something else.
For ten years she had been honoured and looked up to, she remembered bitterly. She had learned how with a thought she could steer the dark amorphous clouds that brought the precious rain, and for her the whole valley became a green, verdant paradise, while her father and mother looked on with fond bewilderment at their strangely gifted daughter. Even old Father Benito had blessed her, saying to anyone who cared to listen that there could be nothing but the Grace of God in a gift so beneficial to all.
All that had changed with the arrival one day of the Royal Witchfinder General with his entourage. It seemed word had leaked out, no doubt carried by merchants or other chance travellers, of the young wonder worker in the tiny mountain hamlet who commanded the forces of nature to be her servants. The Witchfinder listened with a face of stone to the hesitant, stammered evidence produced by villager after villager, that the Lady of the Waters was a force for good and had never harmed anyone, that her magical abilities had kept their village alive when all about them were devoured by drought and pestilence.
The Witchfinder General was a spare, lean man, with a mouth like a steel trap and a voice to match, rusty and harsh, and after he had listened to them all he pronounced judgement. They were deluded fools, he said. The Devil laid such traps for men, seducing them with plentiful harvests and an abundance of worldly riches, in order to prepare an even richer harvest of good Christian souls. They were all in mortal peril of imminent damnation, he cried, and he alone could save them!
There was more, much more, and although at first the villagers protested, saying they saw naught save goodness in her gifts, gradually his unrelenting diatribe (coupled, it had to be said, with the dread power of his Office to enforce his decrees) began to sway them. Cunningly he hinted at the fate awaiting even those who merely approved of such diabolic practices, or even were slow to condemn. The gibbet and the stake awaited them also!
It was only old Father Benito in the end who stood firm in her defence. ‘Where is the proof?’ he asked, his voice quavering with age but fearless for all that. ‘Where is the proof that her powers do not come as a gift from the Most High?’
She did not know who had suggested the ducking stool, which was used as a penalty for scolds and those who bore false witness. It was simply a chair to which the accused was bound, tied in turn to the end of a long pole suspended over a deep pond. Depending on the nature of the offence, it could punish, or with prolonged immersion, kill. The Witchfinder, seeing the wavering of his audience, seized on the moment to propose a test. Father Benito should bless the water, he said. Thus the Evil Spirit in the girl would be exposed, for God in his mercy would not allow a pure Christian soul to drown.
She remembered being tied into the little wooden chair, slimy with algae and dripping with weed, remembered the fascination in the faces ringed about the pond, people she had known all her life who only watched as at some spectacle put on by travelling players. She remembered the drop and the splash and then the suffocating water that invaded her nose and ears, and the burning in her chest as her lungs ached to breathe, and then . . . a moment of strange calm. She felt the water round about her, not as an enemy, but as the friend it had always been, and she spoke in her mind to it, ‘Please, do not let me die! Help me to the air!’ And then she felt the chair begin to rise, up, up, up into the blessed sunlight, and she took in a great lungful of air, smiling, dazzled as the water ran from her hair and clothes, stinging her eyes, and then as they cleared she saw fear and horror on the faces of the people and craned her neck about, not understanding. It was then she saw that the other end of the pole was empty of helping hands, that her feet rested on the surface of the water with no support whatsoever.
In vain did old Father Benito cross himself and proclaim a miracle. Miracles were like folktales, ogres and goblins and witches—something to be told of before the hearthfire in winter, not to be seen in the light of day with the naked eye. The Witchfinder General thundered triumphantly that the pure, blessed water had rejected the witch, who was now to be taken hence and punished as the law should decree.
It was her father who saved her. His authority as Chief Justice in this remote village outmatched the authority of the faraway Royal decree, and if that had not sufficed, his own men at arms, loyal to him if nothing else, more than matched the few brutal bravos that the Witchfinder had brought. Cheated of his prey he rode from the village, vowing to return with a troop of the King’s Calvary who should see justice done.
It was with tears in his eyes that her father then bound her to the mule, knowing that this was merely a temporary respite, that no village force could stand against the soldiers of the King. The villager
s, fearing the reprisals that were sure to follow, vied with each other to heap abuse upon her head as she was led away, competed in hatred and vilification so as not to be among those who might be accused in their turn.
When they were safely out of sight he had loosed her, and tenderly rubbed where the cord had chafed, and wrapped her round with blankets against the keen mountain air. He was taking her to a place of safety, he told her. A holy sanctuary high in the mountains where none should ever discover her.
Holy Sanctuary!—she repeated bitterly to herself. It was not even a full day before she discovered into what sort of hell her father’s well-meaning intervention had landed her. The Order that inhabited the Abbey Saint Gobain was as harsh as any King’s gaolers. Sheltered and cosseted from childhood, she found herself the lowest of the novices, condemned to the worst sort of toil, the most backbreaking labour. The three senior Sisters who oversaw the running of the place were inescapable; no matter where she worked there was always one of them present. In the kitchens it was Sister Salva, dark featured as if burned by the fires she constantly tended, scolding her if the huge range had not been polished to her satisfaction, telling her she must do it over even if it meant missing a nights’ sleep. Or up on the Abbey roof, clinging terrified to an inadequate support while endeavouring to replace a missing tile under the pitiless supervision of Sister Bernice, while the freezing wind sought to dislodge her. Then it was back to the Abbey gardens, weeding and digging with the other novices until her back seemed permanently bent, while the imposing figure of the Mother Superior stood with her habit kilted up and her trunk-like legs looking as though they had taken root in the soil, her tongue as pitiless as any slave-driver’s lash as she castigated those who faltered or tried to rest.
It was there, in the freshly turned soil that the first glimmering of an idea had come to her. The Abbey stood on a vast moraine left behind by the great glaciers of the Age of Ice, where the pulverised rock had with the passing of the ages been turned into a rich soil when mixed with the decayed vegetable matter laid down by countless human inhabitants of these remote regions. Mixed with the soil were clear bits of crystal, quartz and purple amethyst liberated from the rock by the crushing pressure of the ice. To Dara they seemed like drops of water frozen into ice, but an ice that did not melt, that stayed warm and hard and gleaming against her skin where she secreted them. She did not know at first why she kept the tiny crystals, only that they seemed a reminder of the element that now seemed forever lost to her, for no matter what task she was force to endure, water, except for the bare minimum needed for sustenance, was absent.
The Girl with the Peacock Harp Page 19