The Book of the Crowman (14 page)

Once Megan has dressed his injuries as best she can and he is comfortable, Mr Keeper takes her hand and thanks her.

He holds her hand in his for a long time. This contact between them is unprecedented, as is her tending him unclothed, as a patient, as a man who until now has been invulnerable and impossibly beyond her reach. The skin of his torso, though pale, is that of a younger man. His day-to-day appearance, she now realises, is a kind of act or smokescreen; one that implies age and experience beyond his years. She has feelings for this wounded, denuded and vulnerable man. Feelings she ought not to have. It is with a gentle will that she puts them to one side. The Path must come first. Walking it, and walking it well, takes precedence over all other things.

“You’re welcome,” she says after far too long. “I hope I’ve done it right.”

“You couldn’t have done it any better.”

As usual, there are two ways of taking a comment like this from Mr Keeper. She hopes he means she’s done a good job.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” She hears immediately how bad this sounds. “I mean, am I allowed to know?”

Mr Keeper pushes himself up on one elbow and gestures with his chin towards a box near the wind-eye.

“I want to smoke. Could you bring me my pipe?”

She does as he asks, waiting as she always does for information and not expecting to receive any. Once his pipe is primed she holds out a tallow to him and he lights up from its greasy flame. The first draw makes him cough and he collapses onto his back, his face creased in agony. After a while the spasm passes. Pale, he rises onto his elbow again and nods for the candle. Megan holds it out and he relights his pipe. This time there is no cough but she can see the dark seepage through the bandages around his waist.

He blows aromatic tobacco smoke all around himself, relishing the clouds with the satisfaction of a child. Finally, he remembers her question.

“Much as I hate to share this with you, Megan, the time for you to know has come. It is your duty to listen very carefully to what I have to say.”

She nods, ready for whatever Mr Keeper will tell her. She has all the training he has already given her, some of her abilities even beyond his now. And yet, there is a flutter of fear in her gut; that, and a growing sense of the magnitude of a Keeper’s responsibility.

Mr Keeper must see some of this in her face.

“Listen, Megan. I know how you feel, whether you believe that or not. I was once where you are, learning the things you’re learning and fearing the future. What we do isn’t easy and it never will be. For a while, maybe a long while, your duties may seem like some kind of curse. But, and I promise you this from the heart, one day you will wake up and see that it has all been worth it. You’ll see the wider significance of what it is you’ve been doing all the long years. From that day onward you will wake with a smile, knowing another day of Keeping is ahead of you and that what you once thought was a curse is, in fact, a gift.

“Without us, everything would swing out of balance again. Every Keeper has an awakening when this knowledge rises in their blood. You’d think that sense of importance, of vitality, would make a person proud. Arrogant even. But it never does. You’ll never meet a Keeper with anything other humility at his core. When your moment of awakening comes, Megan, you will feel nothing but a deep sense of honour that you, among so many, are strong enough to walk the Black Feathered Path. You will understand your place in the world and you will know you are blessed.”

Mr Keeper taps out the spent bowl of his pipe and refills it. Megan helps him light up.

“There are still people in this land, men mostly, who yearn for the past; for the days before the Black Dawn. These men know there was vast power back then, technologies that made gods of us all. These men believe there is a way to recreate that power and still maintain the balance. The simple fact is, they’re wrong.”

He draws deeply on his pipe.

“They don’t understand the difference between a tool and a machine.”

“What does that mean?”

“People use tools, Megan. Machines use people.”

She thinks about this. She’s not even sure what a machine is.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“By the end of your training, you will. For now, all you need to know is that it will be part of your responsibility to make sure others do not confuse the two.”

He smokes with commitment, his gaze untethered, and Megan assumes he has finished speaking. He is a shapeshifter, an elemental force, and she doubts she’ll ever know the extent of him. Yet now, here he is, bleeding, pale and weak on his bedroll. What if she had taken longer over the writing? Perhaps without her he might have died. Even now, he may not survive. What will his power amount to then? How can Mr Keeper not be powerful enough to save himself? She notices his pipe hand is shaking, and his pallor is more profound; a bleaching out of his skin as though his limbs are shafts of dead wood, abandoned in the sun for years.

She doesn’t know what more to do for him. His trembling worries her. The roundhouse, since she has seen to the fire, is hot. There’s no explanation for his unsteady hands.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, on a whim.

He shakes his head.

“I think you ought to rest,” she says.

“You’re probably right.” He looks at her and his eyes, always so youthful and mischievous, look beaten for the first time. Their whites are yellowy and fractured with tiny rivers of blood and his skin seems to have loosened. His hair has lost its colour at the temples and below the felt-thick locks at the back of his head. “But there’s no time for rest, Megan. That’s what the world after this one is for.”

She points to his bandages.

“You’re still bleeding. You’ll exhaust yourself.”

“Even without the bleeding, I’d feel as bad as I do now. That’s the price of power. Such… gifts are costly and rightly so.”

Megan’s fear for him must show in her eyes. When he asks for water, she knows it’s only to make her feel better. Still, she pours it and tips the drinking bowl for him and it has a rallying effect on both of them. He puts out his hand and holds hers again, just for a moment. There’s such kindness and knowledge in his touch that she almost cannot stand the exquisite surety of the contact. In a thousand years, though, she could never pull away from such a touch, so it is Mr Keeper who withdraws after an appropriately short communion.

“Everything’s going to be alright, Megan. Give it time. Give
me
time and you’ll see.”

He’s talking about her walking the Path now, as though today’s events are already forgotten.

“But what about this… What’s happened to you? Are you going to explain it to me?”

“I’ve been trying. But it’s difficult. You weren’t meant to see it like this.” Mr Keeper sighs deeply, appearing to have run out of clever ways to explain his condition. “I went to check on a group of men whose… activities have come to my attention. They’re very suspicious and they know all about Keepers. For men like these, there’s so much at stake that they would risk killing a Keeper to make certain their work remains secret. The safest to see what they were up to was to accept another form.”

He smiled then, remembering, and tapped out his pipe ready for an unprecedented third bowl. He lights up from the tallow and blows generous puffs of tobacco smoke out through mouth and nostrils like some reclining, ailing dragon.

“Using the stealth and speed of the black panther I tracked these three men to a cave about fifteen miles east of here. When they left, I went inside. They must have spent years and travelled the length and breadth of the country to gather their equipment. They’ll have entered the dead cities to recover artefacts from the old times. The fact they’re not afraid of the ruins of our past is a bad sign. That boldness is the awakening of the same thirst for dominion that awoke the Crowman and brought the Black Dawn. It’s the same mistake we made before: seeking knowledge outside of ourselves, when the root is of all understanding is within.

“These men feel an emptiness inside themselves. We all know that hollowness – it’s natural. It makes us yearn in a language we don’t understand for things we cannot conceive. And yet, if we settle down and watch quietly within – as I’ve shown you, Megan – that space fills up with tranquillity and blessings and simplicity. Then we see and can be content; for our very incarnation in this world is a gift beyond our reckoning.

“But these men have wandered so far from that knowledge that they have stepped back through time into the ignorance that almost ended creation itself. They want hold knowledge and power in their hands and wield them like weapons. They want to control what they do not understand because their very existence terrifies them. And the more they search outside and the more of this outer power they create, the smaller they become, and the farther they shrink from the Great Spirit – who would give them everything they could ever wish for in return for nothing but a little trust and little love.”

Megan is shocked to see that Mr Keeper is crying.

“Everything we’ve done, Megan, all the abundance and goodness that Keepers have opened the world to could be overturned by men like this. Stupid, frightened men filled with nothing but want. Men who cannot see the magic all around them. I fear for the Earth, Megan.” Mr Keeper smokes and knuckles the tears from his eyes. “I’ve seen similar things a dozen times in my years as a Keeper. But I’ve never seen such commitment, such suicidal single-mindedness, as I saw in those three men.”

The effort of the telling has cost Mr Keeper much of the little strength he had remaining. Megan sees him begin to sink down and she crawls to his side to help him lie back. The pipe falls from his hand, the half-smoked bowl still sending up curls of spicy vapour. When he is comfortable and covered up, she takes the pipe and empties it into the belly of the stove. Returning, she finds Mr Keeper either asleep or unconscious, breathing in short, painful-looking spasms. She puts her hand on his forearm and then moves it down to take hold of his hand. His grip is soft and loose.

His eyes flicker open and he smiles.

“I’m alright, Megan. I just need a little time.”

“I know,” she says, though behind her words there are doubts. “I’ll be here. We’ll get you right.”

He nods and Megan can see that he believes in her. This is the greatest weight she has ever carried. He is not only the Keeper,
her
Keeper, he is a man she loves. They are of the same family now, the family of the Earth, and, somewhere above, their spirits are twined together in the weave.

“Mr Keeper?”

“Yes?”

“What were the men making in the cave?”

She watches his sleep-bound eyes remembering what he saw.

“I… don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Do you think they’ll come after you?”

“Whether they do or not, we’ll have to go back there.” His eyes brighten for a moment. “The Path demands it, Megan.”

Gordon woke first and moved Denise’s arm away from his waist. He turned to look at her in the thin morning light, stained green by the flysheet.

She was not unattractive. She was, in reality, a beautiful woman even if the world had left its ugly marks upon her. As intense and prolonged as it had been, the wonders they’d shared in the total blackness of night felt like a bad secret now. He did not love Denise and she did not love him. She needed him in order to stay alive and she knew it. He, in turn, owed her the protection and care that he ought to have given her child.

Everything about Denise was a reminder of what was wrong with this world and only made him wish harder for the world he saw in his dreams. But there was no going back in time, no return to the girl in the sunshine. Everything that happened between him and Denise from now on would only heap more weight on his shoulders. More dissatisfaction. More despair. More hopelessness. Denise was wrong. The world was wrong. They were wrong.

There was a time when he’d cared about the people he met. He’d done his best to help those who needed it whenever he could. He’d harried the Ward with his blade and his cunning. He’d led them across the land, wasted their time, eroded their morale and taken the souls of their agents.

Something had changed; he had to accept it. Though his parents had promised him the Crowman was the only way they could be liberated, he had seen enough substations and watched enough of the Ward’s brutality to understand that they had made a very deliberate and informed sacrifice. They’d known that while he might –
might
– succeed in finding the Crowman and making a difference for the land, he would never do it in time to save them.

His parents and sisters had to be long gone by now. They’d probably been killed within days of him leaving the house – while he was feverish with blood poisoning in the disused railway tunnel. Why this realisation came to him now, he didn’t know. Perhaps he’d finally grown up. After all this time, it felt more like an acknowledgement than a revelation. Much in the same way that, though it mimicked love, love was not what he shared with Denise. That was nothing more than animal necessity.

Such, he now understood after these three years of searching, was the case with his quest for the Crowman. It was a necessity. Not for him. Not for his family. For the world. There was nothing else left for him to discover now. No love for Gordon Black. No bright future for him. No bucolic tranquillity at the side of a woman he truly loved. The world would not heal during his own short span. He would not find joy in his lifetime. Only one thing worth living for remained. A thin bar of hope pointing through clouds of despair. Find the Crowman and the world had a chance, even if he did not. He would lead Denise to safety as he’d promised and then he’d finish this.

He sat up, cold with determination, moved their bags from the doorway and crept out. No sun penetrated the clouds. It was hard to say what time of day it was. All he knew was that the time to move on had come.

He slipped into the icy river to wash himself.