Advent (17 page)

 
She looked at him curiously for a few quickened strides, skipping to keep up.

 
‘You’re unhappy, aren’t you,’ she said matter-of-factly.

 
‘Nah. This is how I always look.’

 
Again she missed his irony completely. ‘No, it’s not. You wanted to talk to me, back in the house. When you told me about sleepwalking. That was good. Now you’re being growly, like Caleb.’

 
He stopped and faced her, about to snap something, anything that would shut her up and drive her away, make her leave him alone. She watched him, head tilted, quizzical. Something about her look held him back. After a few moments he realised what it was. She was examining him without contempt, or anxiety, or bewilderment. It struck him that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a look like that directed at him.

 
So he said, ‘Sorry.’

 
‘That’s OK. Gwen told me most people don’t understand you. She said it makes you sad.’

 
He snorted. ‘She got that right.’

 
‘She says the things that happen when you’re young mark you on the outside. The same way you can make trees grow in weird shapes if you bend them when they’re still soft. Like with Caleb, that’s why he always looks like that. Gwen calls him Grumplestiltskin. Well, not to his face; that would be a bit harsh. She says it’s because he ran away from home. No one was ever kind to him before Daddy and by then it was too late.’

 
‘What about me then? Do I look pissed off?’

 
‘Look what?’

 
‘Pissed off.’

 
‘What does that mean?’

 
Again, there wasn’t the slightest sign that she was teasing.

 
‘Um. Cross.’

 
‘Oh. Sorry.’ She stepped alarmingly close to examine his face. Her glassy eyes darted from side to side, full of restless life. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘You look . . . what’s that word? Like glum, but a bit more serious.’

 
‘Miserable?’

 
His humour was obviously too black for her to see. ‘No, not that. Sort of in between. Morbose?’

 
‘Morose?’

 
‘That’s it!’

 
‘I look morose. Cool. Thanks.’

 
Now her face fell. ‘Sorry.’

 
‘Never mind. It’s totally fair enough. My life is shit. I just never knew it was so obvious.’

 
‘Shit?’

 
He could only stare. The tenor of the stare must have been obvious even to her.

 
‘I didn’t mean you don’t look nice,’ she mumbled apologetically, looking away.

 
‘It’s OK. Nice things don’t happen to me.’

 
‘Sorry.’

 
‘Not your fault. I should have done what he did. Caleb. Run away from home. Ages ago.’

 
She looked sideways at him, shyly, hesitating to ask, but eventually her curiosity won out.

 
‘So why didn’t you?’

 
‘Why didn’t I run away?’

 
‘Yes.’

 
He looked around at the snagging undergrowth on either side, the decrepit track running between. In the last couple of years he’d thought about it often enough. Seriously thought about it, not just indulging vengeful childish dreams. He’d lain in bed carefully planning it out. Every time he came to the same dead end in the plan. Stealing the money, OK; packing and leaving and buying a ticket, OK; and then going . . . where? That was the problem. The first few parts were wonderful to imagine – the triumphant ecstasy of escaping from his parents, cutting loose and leaving it all behind him – but then came the realisation that wherever he tried to go instead, he’d still be himself. There was no escape from that.

 
‘I didn’t have anywhere to go,’ he said.

 
‘You should have come here, like Caleb did.’

 
Easy for you to say
, he was about to retort, but he could tell she’d meant it honestly. A shiver of wind stirred the last leaves overhead, and at the sound he gazed up and around, into the spaces full of calm shadow, the subtle unobtrusive browns of bark and litter and earth.

 
‘You’re right, you know. I should have.’

 
This won him a vivid smile.

 
‘Well, now you’re here, it’s not a problem any more, is it? You can just stay.’

 
She said this the way she said almost everything else: as if it were obvious. Gav wondered for a moment whether it was worth trying to explain to her what the real world was like. It was plain to him by now that she was some kind of little rich girl with a silver spoon in her mouth and no idea how everyone else lived. Least of all him. Maybe, he thought, it would just be easier to say, ‘Never mind,’ and go back to the house and play hide-and-seek or whatever it was you did with kids who had a social age somewhere around eight.

 
Then it occurred to him that he wasn’t the most reliable authority on how the real world worked either.

 
An odd feeling stirred in him with that thought. He looked at Marina, bright, untroubled, weirdly innocent. So innocent that she’d apparently just invited him to live with her, here, for ever.

 
The idea hung in front of him like a glimpse of paradise. Forbidden, out of reach, but almost unbearably beautiful.

 
He sighed. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

 
‘What doesn’t?’

 
‘I can’t just . . . move.’

 
‘There’s loads of room in the house.’

 
‘Yeah, I’m sure there is. That’s not the point. You can’t just . . . There’s school and home and stuff.’ Even the words felt like descending weights. ‘I’m only here ’cos Mum and Dad had a holiday booked already and no one who could be around in the day so they needed somewhere to send me when I got— when I couldn’t go to school for a bit. As soon as they’re back I have to go home.’

 
‘Do you really?’

 
‘Course. Not everyone gets to live like this all the time.’

 
‘I know that. But didn’t you say they don’t like you, your parents?’

 
‘Yeah, I did.’

 
‘So why go back there? Gwen likes you a lot. I do too, even though you look whatever it is. Morose.’ She grinned an unexpectedly sly grin.

 
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’d be the same if you lived in my house.’

 
‘Then don’t. Stay here. We could talk. Gwen says you probably know what it’s like for me better than anyone. You already did, about the sleepwalking, remember?’

 
Why can’t I?

 
‘Mum and Dad would never let me.’

 
‘I don’t get that. If they don’t like you, why wouldn’t they let you come and live here instead?’

 
Because that’s not how things work. Because that’s not how the real world works. Oh, come on, Marina.

 
He took a deep breath. What had got into him that he was suddenly sounding like Dad?

 
He made himself think seriously about her question. It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded, really. It was all too obvious that he and his parents had been making each other miserable for a couple of years now. What was it, actually, that made them all keep going?

 
‘It’s ’cos they think they do,’ he said at last. ‘They don’t actually like me, but they think they do. Or at least Mum thinks she does.’
Take care of yourself, Gav love. I love you!
‘Dad’s stopped even trying to pretend.’

 
‘So why don’t they like you? I can tell you’re nice.’

 
I don’t know, he thought, with a surprising ache of misery. I really don’t know. I don’t know what I did wrong. It’s not my fault. But of course he did know, really.

 
They were deep under the trees. He’d never been anywhere like this before in his life. It seemed untouched by time and the outside world. For all he knew it might have always been the same messy tangle of wet wood and silence since before people, before history. It was the forest where trees fell and there was no one to hear them. The real answer to her question burned on the tip of his tongue. He could grit his teeth and swallow it and go on being burned up inside, or he could spit it out.

 
‘It’s because I’m different,’ he said.

 
She looked puzzled. ‘Everyone’s different, aren’t they? That what Gwen always says.’

 
‘Yeah, well, actually she’s wrong.’ His cheeks were burning. He’d never rehearsed this. He didn’t know how to begin to say who he was, and it frustrated him that she couldn’t even grasp the first principle. ‘Everyone’s the same. Everyone except me. Everyone else has one set of rules. I don’t. I see things that aren’t there.’

 
His heart was hammering and his mouth was dry as he said it. It was as far as he could go. He stared at her, waiting for a response: laughter, incomprehension. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. Only eleven days ago he’d tried saying this in front of Mr Bushy. Eleven days ago. Friday lunch break. He’d sworn he’d never be so utterly stupid again.

 
What she said was, ‘You too?’

Eight

Autumn 1537

To experience the
moment that consummates a life’s work: how many men are so blessed, in the ordinary run of things? But then the magus had always known he was very far from being an ordinary man.

 
For some thirty years, beginning when he was barely old enough to rub bristles on his chin, he had studied the unseen world, venturing among its secrets like a traveller in the ruins of an ancient city. In the halls where Moses and Pythagoras and the thrice-great Hermes once ruled, he took what light there was to find and made his way, passageway by dusty passageway. By patience and discipline he grew adept in his art. He learned the virtues of leaf, stone and star. He laboured at the forms of conjuration and compulsion that allowed him to converse with insubstantial beings. Over months and years of study he uncovered their names and taught himself the rudiments of the immortal language in which those names were pronounced. He bound spirits to serve him, and by their power loosened the warp and weft of time and space. His eyes strained through nights of study. His beard turned grey. He toiled for decades, until his name was famous throughout the palaces of Europe and he was as far beyond every other alchemist or magician or conjurer as the princes of those palaces were beyond the servants that swept their floors.

 
But all along he knew that his highest achievements were little more than fugitive glimpses of the true architecture and harmony of creation. Despite his fame, despite his lifetime’s labour, he had done no more than creep like an uninvited guest around the humblest antechambers of the courts of wisdom, peering at fragments by rushlight – until the moment he first put on the ring.

 
That night, in his observatory, it was in one instant as if every door was unlocked, every casement opened, and the ruin made alive with light and pageantry and solemn music. He saw and heard the life all around him as it must have been in the infancy of the Earth, the golden age, when the breath of creation blew fresh everywhere, and men and spirits walked as neighbours beside each other. The ring’s small circle was a vent through which that breath blew in on him. It was a crack in the wall that separated the mortal sphere from the realms of the undying. Through it he saw living spirits dance before him like figures in a gilded landscape, their music celestial harmony.