Advent (26 page)

 
‘This way.’

 
He hesitated before following her out of the light. There was no obvious reason to be frightened. He shoved his hands in his pockets and told himself not to be stupid. The strip of woodland they’d entered couldn’t be all that wide. Looking out of the window at the bottom of the stairs, he’d seen open land beyond, and the river not far below. Yet from the inside it felt like stepping into a labyrinth of bark and moss and shadow.

 
Before long they reached a point where the path branched. There was a kind of bridge, just two planks of wood embedded in the mud. A trickle of water ran beneath it. One route followed the streamlet down to the left. ‘The river’s that way,’ Marina told him, and his heart leaped at the prospect of getting out from the cover of the twisting rain-blackened branches, but she led on the other way.

 
They’d gone only a minute further when a noise like a pulse of wind passed over them. Instinctively, Gav looked up. The trees had not so much as shivered, but above them was a strange movement like the shadow of a small dark cloud blowing swiftly past.

 
‘What was that?’

 
There was no sun to cast shadows. The clouds were unbroken pencil grey.

 
‘What?’

 
‘That noise.’

 
‘Wasn’t it just the wind?’

 
‘There’s no wind. I thought I saw . . .’

 
She followed his gaze up into the motionless crowns of the trees. ‘A flock of birds?’

 
‘Maybe, but . . . big.’

 
‘The rooks sometimes fly together.’

 
He shrugged, trying very hard to ignore the inexplicable tightness clutching his back and shoulders and guts. He’d have suggested they turn round and go home except for the prospect of trying to explain to Marina why he’d changed his mind. ‘Never mind. We nearly there?’

 
‘Yes, very nearly. Just up the path a little. Wait.’

 
‘What?’

 
She raised a hand and stood very still, so he did the same, holding his breath.

 
Then he heard it too.

 
It was muffled and faraway. It was the kind of oddly sourceless sound you might hear from a very high window in a quiet street, the sash open just a couple of inches and a radio on in the room inside, or someone practising an instrument. Except that in this case the instrument was a crystal harp, or the radio was tuned to the melody of the spheres.

 
‘Listen!’ Marina whispered.

 
Or it was a sound blown through an invisible window from another world, the land of lost enchantment. The voice that sang was untouched by earth, like a star fallen in among the trees, calling to its impossibly remote kin.

 
Marina’s eyes were shining. ‘Just like Horace said! Come on!’

 
But now, finally, Gavin knew something was happening that was not like anything he had known before. The odd atmosphere in the house, Auntie Gwen’s absence, Marina and her peculiar conversation – all these things were strange to him the way everything was strange to him. Being with her had made him accept them. This was her world. If she wasn’t worried about it, why should he be? But now, rooted to the spot by his sudden dread, watching her hurry on up the path, he saw, all at once, that her innocence was fragile and terrible. She feared nothing because she’d never had anything to fear. She knew nothing because she’d never discovered how ignorant she was.

 
Something was wrong.

 
He wasn’t imagining it. An impossible shadow had flown over the wood, and now there was distant singing under the branches, inhumanly beautiful.

 
It begins.

 
Come.

 
‘Marina!’

 
She stopped for a second, twenty paces ahead, diminutive under the great contorted trees. ‘Isn’t it lovely? Come on!’

 
‘Marina, wait!’ He stumbled after her, but her vacillation was dispelled. She was the eager child again, excited about showing him her world, which she understood no better than he did. She pointed ahead.

 
‘There it is, you can see it now. Hurry up!’

 
‘Marina, hang on.’

 
He’d crested a small rise and the trickling stream had come back into sight. Footway and waterway clambered a short distance together, ascending to a hollow scooped out of the hillside. She was already making her way lightly up the steeper slope.

 
‘Wait!’

 
‘It’s just up here,’ she called, without turning round. He scrambled after her until he could see ahead.

 
Some thorny-looking growth overwhelmed the bank of earth at the back of the hollow. Half buried in the vegetation, overhung by the same rough-barked knotty trees that dominated the woods, was a roundish building of worn stone with a pitched roof. There were smaller trees screening it in front, dark straggly evergreens. It looked old, lost, silent, secreted away in woods that had grown and fallen and regrown many times in its history, a relic of some pious impulse that had been dead for centuries. Meant to stay undisturbed, like a tomb. The track led nowhere else; the tangled undergrowth beyond was impassable.

 
Marina had got ahead and wouldn’t wait for him. ‘Come and look! It sounded like it came from here somewhere.’

 
Her peculiar shoes slipped and slid on leaves and earth wet from the night’s downpour, but she was quick, so that when Gav saw something night-dark and cruel-faced and impossible uncurl itself from behind the stone parapet above the chapel door and flit down out of sight, he knew he’d left it too late to stop her. He stumbled forward, trying to shout a warning, but horror had stopped his throat. She was concentrating on keeping her footing and hadn’t looked up, or back, and he was desperately clumsy on the muddy track. There was a rush of sudden noise all above them: a flight of crows shaking loose from the branches, croaking all together as they sped up towards the light. ‘What?’ he heard her say, and she turned back for a moment to see him righting himself, but before he could even catch his breath, ‘Oh look!’ she called excitedly. ‘The door’s open!’

 
She had reached the clump of trees in front of the building.

 
‘Stop,’ he heard himself yell. ‘Don’t—’

 
Too late. She was no longer listening. She was peering round the open door into the chapel.

 
All the excitement drained out of her in an instant.

 
Gav saw her mouth one small word, swallowed by the hiss of the woods: ‘Gwenny?’

 
She had taken three hesitant steps forward by the time Gavin scrambled and panted his way to where she stood. Without thinking, he grabbed her hand to pull her away. As he did so, his eyes strayed inside the door and he too froze.

 
It was the light that stopped him. It rippled and burned dim, like a sunset seen through water. The rest of the interior was night-black. The unearthly radiance glowed around a pool set in the floor, turning the water to dusky fire.

 
Silhouetted against that light, a thin woman knelt beside the pool. She was a black outline. The dark concealed her.

 
Two things only caught the gleam and shone. Beside the pool, close to where the woman’s hand knuckled on the stone floor, the metal clasp of a small box was glinting, and looped onto a slender silver chain, hanging down from her neck as she crouched forward, something small and darkly glossy reflected tiny star-specks into Gav’s unblinking eyes.

 
His mind had gone blank. The earth under him and the air around him, the damp woods and the winter sky, none of it had any hold on him any more. The singing had stopped.

 
An invisible voice spoke, a whispering chorus of dead leaves. The molten glow stirred with the words.

 
Flesh, Master. Recall your promise.

 
The woman spoke in a voice horribly like and horribly unlike a voice Gavin remembered. Each word was a hard pebble in her mouth.

 
‘Who are these?’

 
‘Gwenny?’ Marina whimpered.

 
Children of the house
. The other voice was nowhere. It rustled from the chapel’s stones like speaking dust.
The girl, a changeling. The boy, an orphan, and ward of her you seek.

 
The shadow of the woman’s head lifted. ‘Then bring them in.’

 
Gav found his will again. He tugged on Marina’s shoulders and turned to run. There was a confused terror of sudden whirling green in front of his face, coming at him from everywhere. Marina screamed. He was buffeted and scratched. He flung his hands up, closing his eyes, and something crashed into his midriff and sent him sprawling back though the doorway. Marina had fallen behind him. He tripped over her and struck his head, hard, on the stone inside, falling into darkness.

Eleven

Summer 1537

Carissima
, ‘
dearest
’,
was
what the magus called her. The name he had first known her by was an ill-fated one. Other names had been given by those who once venerated her, but that was long, long ago, and in his eyes they no more properly belonged to her than the beggar’s rags she wore.

 
‘
Carissima
, the world is changing.’

 
She answered, ‘Change is the law of things, Johannes.’

 
It was the fall of a summer night. All around was a flat horizon, calm water on one side, on the other the marshes and the wet plain beyond them, pocked with stumpy windmills. He and she walked along a ridge formed of sand and the stiff dune-grass. Though traces of the day hung around its edges, the sky was more brilliant than anyone alive in Gavin’s day could imagine. There was no moon, and Earth shed little light of its own in the year 1537, so apart from some skeins of cloud there was nothing to dim the stars. He looked up at their silent multitude.

 
‘This is a new kind of change. It touches even the fixed sphere.’

 
She gazed upwards also, but said nothing.

 
‘Perhaps it touches even you.’

 
She put her hand in his. It felt like parchment, dry and yielding. He opened her palm but read nothing there. She rarely spoke at all unless he broke the silence first, and sometimes not even then. He’d become used to the idea that he had to earn words from her.

 
‘The world has grown indifferent to you and I.’

 
The Latin they spoke to each other composed their conversations to this courtly, formal manner. Johannes could never imagine addressing her in his native speech, though for all he knew every tongue in Christendom was known to her. It would be like a priest saying the Mass in the language of a Saxon peasant, addressing the Author of all things as if He were a market butcher. And yet such things were done now, he reminded himself.

 
He stroked her open hand with a fingertip. ‘You are forgotten, shunned as a beggar by all save me, and I grow old,
carissima
, I grow old. What will you do when I am gone?’

 
This time she answered at once. ‘I will grieve for you and long for you, my lord.’

 
Domine
, my lord, master. She never spoke anything but the truth. The wonder of it almost drowned him.