Advent Read online

  ‘Good lass,’ Caleb said from behind him. ‘You and your friend go enjoy yourselves. Inside, though.’

  ‘Cousin,’ Marina corrected.

  ‘Cousin,’ he echoed, but the tone said, Stranger, outsider. Enemy. Gav quickened his stride.

  She trotted to catch up, her peculiar shoes swishing through the grass and damp leaves that cracked through the decayed driveway. ‘Hey! Wait for me.’

  ‘Sorry if I got us into trouble,’ he said glumly, as she came alongside.

  ‘We’re not in trouble. Caleb said everything’s fine.’

  Gav looked back. The man had already disappeared from sight.

  ‘He didn’t seem too happy.’

  ‘Oh, that’s how Caleb always looks.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I don’t think he likes me being here.’

  ‘You? Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Didn’t exactly seem like he wanted to be friendly, did he? I’ve had warmer welcomes. Well, maybe I haven’t, actually.’

  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.

  He tore the ring off the small finger of his right hand, his heart throbbing like the watchmen’s drum.

  His very first thought was: What have I won?

  He tried to thank her the next time they met. Summer had ripened the fields ready for autumn to mow them down, and the evenings were becoming cool. They walked by the sea less often. She was as indifferent to the sharp offshore wind as to every other mundane concern, but he felt it keenly, down to his bones. Age was catching up with him. He could not suppress twinges of unruly resentment when he felt her hand in his, thinner and rougher than his own, and noticed that though she was all skin and bones, she never shivered beneath her plain cloak. At first he’d found her hardiness magnificent, a reminder of how miraculously different she was from everyday women, and loved her for it. But now, as the evenings darkened, it seemed to reflect badly on his own frailty.

  His mortality.

  Her silence had begun to grate on him too. When once he’d walked beside her in contented quiet, he now found that her paucity of words irritated him. It struck him as a kind of stubbornness. At the beginning of the year, when he’d first found her again, he’d thrown questions at her like a wild boy throwing stones at roosting birds. He’d been so perfectly entranced by the miracle that he’d somehow not minded how rarely she answered, how often she only turned her solemn look on him and said, ‘I don’t know, Johannes.’

  As the year waned, he wondered how he of all people could have been content with such nothings for so long.

  It was the same when he tried to thank her. His head was spinning with wonder, his heart brimmed with gratitude, and yet she seemed as unmoved by the gift she’d placed in his keeping as if the ring were no more than the modest hoop of wood it appeared to be.

  They were in the rutted roads among fields south of the city, the ditches brown and stinking with a summer’s worth of drowning weeds. She walked barefoot as always, the hem of her cloak soiled. It was harder by the week for him to see her for what he knew she was, no more an ordinary woman than he was an ordinary man. Still, he tried to remember whose love he had earned as he spoke. He was, after all, acknowledging a gift whose value could not be measured by the treasuries of all the kings and emperors of the world.

  But despite his sincerity she only walked on, unsmiling. He felt rebuffed.

  ‘I know now what the gift is worth.’ His right hand clenched and unclenched. ‘I wore it last night. Perhaps,’ he went on, not entirely managing to quell the impatience in his voice, ‘you did not fully understand it yourself when you presented it to me.’

  At this she stopped, looked at him and gave him an answer at last. It was not one he had looked for.

  ‘I made you no present, Johannes.’ She took his hand. ‘I gave you no gift. I offered you my burden and you accepted it. It is a heavy burden, heavier than you know.’ Embarrassed, he looked away, to the long horizon. He felt her fingers tighten. ‘If you cannot bear it, you must return it to me.’

  At this he forced his face into a smile and said, ‘For your sake, I would bear anything.’ But for the very first time he knew he was dissembling before her.

  The truth was that he treasured the ring for his own sake, not hers. Had he not devoted himself with unexampled constancy to seeking out the world’s hidden truths? Was he not the greatest magus since the ancient days? Her ring, he understood, was his reward.

  That evening, at the window of his observatory, watching the hunter heave his starry bulk above the eastern horizon, turning the ring between his fingers, he contemplated the worth of that prize.

  He thought of the years he had sacrificed to earn his station. He thought of the strength he had lost in solitary study, the pleasures of life willingly foregone. He watched the stars in their fixed and highest sphere, far above time and decay and death. When he put on the ring, he could feel their sweet influence all around him, wasted on the uncaring city beneath. He was the only one who revered their crystalline glory. In a meagre study in Frombork the canon Copernik readied his hammer, preparing to
smash the celestial spheres into nothing. The magus knew of his work. All educated men seemed to know it. All over Europe those who called themselves wise ranged themselves alongside the vandal, eager to slay the universe so they could pick over its broken pieces like so many watchmakers. And meanwhile the rabble shouted the name of the monk Luther, who preached that God was not to be found anywhere in His creation. His followers broke images and painted walls white so they could bring themselves as near as possible to the condition of blindness, and proclaimed their cause a holy crusade.

  In such a world, was it not his duty to bear the gift of the living creation? And to go on bearing it, as she had? On and on?

  For many years now he had worried about what would happen after his death. His own pupils had turned out as venial as common apprentices. Their interest in magic extended as far as transmuting base metal into gold and conjuring obedient spirits who promised buried treasure or maidens’ hearts. He knew of no one to whom he could entrust his art.

  Surely, then, this was the burden he willingly accepted: to defy time and decay and death, like the stars.

  Immortality.

  She had endured through inconceivable expanses of time with the ring on her finger. Why should not he?

  He sought her out less often as autumn drew on. Each time he encountered her his heart would lurch. He hardly knew what to say to her any more, and she had never been afraid of silence. Sometimes they did no more than stand mutely together, hands clasped, reluctance in his face and the same abyssal darkness in hers. She never complained about his reticence. Reproach was not in her nature, any more than any other self-tormenting frailty. Still, where her gaze once exhilarated him, it now caused him discomfort. Those prophetic eyes seemed to look inside him.

  One late afternoon he was returning from some business outside the city, riding slowly along a straight road under a greenish sky, when he saw her standing ahead, waiting for him. When she pushed back her hood, there was a look of strange disquiet in her face. It reminded him unexpectedly of the first time he had seen her – how beautiful she had been then, how marvellous. He dismounted and embraced her.