Advent Page 12
‘Johannes.’ Her coarse fingers traced the shape of his cheekbones beneath the skin. ‘I have seen you drowned.’
He stiffened, then eased her hand away, smiling. ‘No, carissima.’
‘All that touches me suffers.’ Her mouth was tense as if pulled tight by pain. ‘A woman drowns but death escapes her. It was you I saw, Johannes.’
So this was what the surrender of her gift had left her, the magus thought sadly: a driveller. She seemed all of a sudden very frail and small. He stroked the tangled knots of her hair.
‘Do not fear for me,’ he said, as he would have reassured any fretful old woman.
A cart’s wheels creaked on the road behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the plodding ox approaching, bringing another load of hay into the city. Its hooves rose and fell . . . and then rose but did not fall; the world around the magus and the woman went still, the green-tinted light suddenly luminous and clear like the heart of a gem. He turned back and saw that time had fallen away from her as well. Her face was the same, but now proud, fierce, full of fiery life, the face he had first fallen in love with: the face of a princess. Enraptured, he leaned to kiss her. She stopped him with a finger to his lips.
‘You cannot bear what I have offered you,’ she said.
It was in that exact instant that the magus determined to escape her.
He did not know it at the time, not consciously. All he knew was the rude shock those words gave, but that recoil was the seed that would grow over the next months into his hurried flight on the English vessel. His pride was wounded, and it stung. So suddenly and surprisingly and completely that it was like an emotion felt by another person, he felt a bitter determination to keep what he had won, to keep it for ever.
‘You judged me wrongly, then?’ he muttered.
‘I do not judge, Johannes. You came to me and did not turn away. You heard me. For that I waited for you and for that I love you. Because of that I asked you to take my burden from me. But it is not lifted. It is still mine. I saw the woman in the water. I saw her drown and not die. Her fate was yours. A terrible fate. You must return what I gave you.’
Whatever the magus might have thought of the rest of her speech – and he had rarely heard her speak so many words at once – the final sentence drove every other consideration out of his head. He forgot who she was, her ill-fated name. He forgot what gift had been laid on her. He forgot the idyll of the spring and summer, when he had loved her with his whole soul. The only thought left to him was terror of losing the ring.
‘I have accepted your burden, carissima,’ he said soothingly, and was astonished at how false his own words sounded. But surely it was the truth, the noble truth? ‘I have considered it and comprehended it.’ No other man alive or dead these thousand years could have said the same; was that not so? ‘I take it upon myself.’
‘It will destroy you,’ she said, and now he was equally astonished at how true those two words rang. Te delebit, a peal of fateful syllables, even though he knew she was exactly wrong: the ring was his guarantee against destruction. He had seen how. It would open his path to immortality.
‘It has sustained you,’ he retorted. And what was she after all but a woman, the weaker vessel? He was stronger as well as wiser.
‘Do you envy that, Johannes? Do you envy what I endured?’
‘No, certainly.’ The lies had got hold of his tongue. Everything he said to her was the opposite of the truth, though he believed it.
‘Then let me suffer again. Spare yourself. Return my gift.’
‘It is not with me,’ he said feebly, as if he was a boy caught thieving.
She clutched at his hand. ‘You listen, but you do not hear.’
‘Calm yourself.’ He disentangled his fingers from hers and looked towards the city, hoping the lateness of the hour would rescue him. ‘The gate will close. Let me consider this.’
‘The gate will close,’ she echoed. Her eyelids flickered and an unseasonal shiver ran through her. He doubted she had the city gate in mind. ‘The gate will close. The gate will close.’
A straining creak came from behind him, and the splotch of the ox’s hoof into muddy earth. He mounted and rode back to the city, leaving her whispering inaudibly to herself as the evening sky turned sickly yellow.
He sat awake all that night.
By morning he had determined to cross the sea, to England. It was an outpost remote enough not to be touched by the chaos and bloodshed the planets warned of. There were letters to be written and monies to be raised. He planned it all out while the stars turned, in feverish haste. Despite the sleepless night he began to work at his usual hour the next day, but now he locked and barred the door of his laboratory behind him. He put aside everything he had been studying before that morning, all the instruments of the baser alchemy. A new course consumed him. He unchained tomes he would once have hesitated even to touch, within whose bindings were the shunned and buried secrets of the pagan magicians. Ignorant of heaven, they had devoted themselves to the wisdom of Pythagoras and the Egyptians, who believed that souls might travel from body to body. He began to exhume the most ancient foundation of his art, the forgotten palaces of wisdom, whose only visible remains, like the wave-worn and barnacled spires of a sunken city making strange shapes above the ocean’s surface, were the alchemists’ fraudulent phantoms – the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of youth, grotesque distortions of truths that had been lost since the time of Hermes Trismegistus.
Hermes had lived for nearly a thousand years, and so had Mahalalel and Methuselah the ancestors of Noah.
With the ring in his grasp, he dreamed of a magic that would preserve his soul from bodily death.
All the time he was haunted by the fear of losing it. The gift given in love had become a prize, a treasure, and like anyone else in possession of a treasure the magus became tormented by the need to guard it. It was his own; it belonged to him; it had to be shut away from thieves.
So he made the pouch and spent two weeks warding it, first from common sight and then, gradually, from all other harms and devices that he knew. The only thing he did not know how to protect it from was time: for, powerful as his wards were, they were nevertheless no more than sorceries, barely worth the name of art, and in themselves no more enduring than anything else made by men.
So he made the box to hold the pouch. He built it out of ash and alder, sovereign against fire and water, and then he made its clasp from silver, the moon’s metal, receptive to charms.
Into the clasp he worked a spell of closure and endurance. It was a full day’s labour. Even to call it a spell was demeaning. It was as far above the common magics inscribed on the bag as the magus himself was above a village witch. It drew down the virtue of Saturn, the most secret and lasting of all changeable things, whose station was proximate to eternity, whose meanings were hiddenness and permanence, and it laid that virtue upon the box. Not for ever: even the planets were ruled by time. But the measures of the spheres stretched inconceivably beyond the span of men, and it was only against men that the magus wished to guard his treasure. So he spoke into the clasp a potency measured by the circle of Saturn, and then he spoke it again, to double it. The spell was punishing to pronounce even once, but he could not stop. He had staked his life to his prize. He spoke the charm again, to double it once more, and then again, and then a fifth time. He reached the limit of his strength, but he had made a vault for his treasure that would endure for centuries.
Yet no wards could protect it from the thing he feared most, which was that she might raise an open palm to him again and take back what she had given. If his conscience had been clear, he would have understood the significance of this fear. She had told him plainly enough that the prize he planned to steal away to England did not truly belong to him, but he closed his ears and believed what he wanted to believe: an ordinary man, after all.
As autumn faded into winter, he rarely left the house, and never ventured outside the city. Two or
three times he thought he saw her in the streets, as a man might think he sees his doppelgänger, and swerved away, forcing his protesting limbs into an undignified run. He set his servants to watch the door of the house day and night. In that manner, hiding from the truth, the greatest magus in the world prepared himself for his passage to immortality.
Nine
‘I’ve never told anyone this before,’ Marina said, her voice very small.
Gavin could only stare. He’d been ready for bafflement. He’d been ready to be dismissed, or ignored, or even laughed at. He wasn’t even the slightest bit prepared for trust. He had no defence against it.
‘It’s only sometimes,’ she went on. Her skinny hands twisted at the sleeves of her too-big jumper. ‘Promise you won’t tell anyone else.’
He blinked. ‘Um . . .’
‘I’m not supposed to let people see me. I have to be careful.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘I know you think that’s stupid, but I’m not supposed to. Anyway, she’s never there for long, and I can’t help it, unless I never went near the river at all and I couldn’t give that up. I couldn’t!’
She looked up at him so suddenly and passionately that he had to answer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Course not. But—’
‘Promise you won’t tell anyone? Not even Daddy. Please don’t.’
His mouth worked without a sound for a while and then at last he managed to say, ‘Tell him what?’
‘You know. Like you said. The woman no one else sees. At least I don’t think anyone else does. I asked Horace about it once. Carefully, obviously, not actually saying about her, I just asked whether there were people living in the river like that, and he said no, that was just stories.’ The sentences tripped over each other in nervous haste. ‘Anyway she always dives away if there’s a boat coming.’
‘Marina—’
‘And I was reading this book once and there was a picture, so I showed it to Gwen and she said it was something the sailors used to imagine because they’d been away at sea so long. She said maybe once long ago there had been people like that but the world had changed. I think that’s what she said. Or was that something else? I—’
‘Marina, hang on.’
Her hand went to cover her mouth, a comically artless gesture.
‘What?’ she said.
Gav’s head was buzzing. He felt that if he shook it and waited a moment longer, all the words she’d just spoken would turn out to have been hallucinations, and what she’d actually said would have been Don’t be stupid. Oh come on. That’s impossible. You don’t expect me to believe that do you? But it wasn’t a hallucination, and the reason he knew it wasn’t was that he could see the back of her hand, the slight curve of her fingers, the funny twist of her open mouth behind it, and he’d never in all his life seen anything more completely real and true than those tiny details.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
She drew in a breath, opened her mouth, stood there for a second gaping like a fish, then closed it again.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you. This way.’
And instead of carrying on towards the house, Marina stepped off the track into the woods on the downhill side. Her soft shoes sank into leaf mould up to her ankles, but she headed off round boughs and brambles as unhesitatingly as she’d walked on the driveway. The obstacles only made her gait a little gawkier than usual. ‘Come on,’ she repeated.
Gavin stepped gingerly into the carpeted mud. ‘Wait. Weren’t we going back to the house?’
‘It’s not too far.’ Her voice came muffled by the damp woods. ‘Anyway, Caleb said everything was all right.’
‘What’s not too far?’
‘The lookout. Oh, of course, you don’t know about it. It’s a place where you can see through a gap in the trees to the river. It’s just a couple of minutes. I sometimes see her there.’
‘See who?’
‘The woman you were talking about.’
‘Miss Grey?’ Gav said, half under his breath. He was completely confused now, his bearings lost as thoroughly as his steps in the trackless wood.
‘What?’
Was it as simple as that? Had he suffered years of misery just because he’d been in the wrong place, talking to the wrong people all along? Was everything that was impossibly obvious to him just as obvious to this one strange girl? It was such an extraordinary thought that he didn’t know what to do with it.
‘Nothing,’ he said. Then, ‘Wait. Who’s Horace?’
She spun round. ‘How do you know Horace?’
‘I don’t. You said something . . . Just now, you said you asked Horace something.’
‘Oh, did I? Sorry. He’s my friend.’ She almost made it sound like a job description, as if she’d said He’s my yoga teacher. ‘Come on, we should be quick. I did promise Caleb.’
‘Marina?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know what I said, back there on the driveway? What I told you?’
‘Yes?’
‘Weren’t you . . .’ Surprised? Horrified? Embarrassed? ‘You didn’t think I was making it up?’
She turned back to him again, her face transformed by an enormous teasing smile.
‘I thought you said you could tell when I didn’t believe you.’
Before he could think of how to answer she was off again. ‘There’s a path just ahead,’ she said, gesturing towards what appeared to be more tangled wet brown. ‘After that it’s not far.’
He jogged a few steps to catch up. Was she really taking him to see Miss Grey, the way Mum and Dad took him to visit the boring aunt in the country? They came to a narrow track, no more than a furrow in the rotting leaves. Off to their left was what appeared to be the edge of the wood. The snaking path continued downhill, the slope beginning to descend more steeply. Marina had begun chatting again, as if nothing they’d just said to each other was surprising, as if the secret that had haunted Gavin and shut him up in years of bitter silence was after all just as innocent and harmless as she was.
‘There’s a path for other people over that way. Along the edge of the wood. For walking. Hardly anyone ever uses it, but Caleb says you could get through the fence there if you really wanted to. This one only goes as far as the lookout, then the slope becomes too steep. It’s all right for me to sit there, there’s a footpath below but it’s hidden. Hardly anyone’s about at this time of year anyway. In the summer quite a few people go walking there, but then the leaves are out of course, no one can see. It’s one of my favourite places. You see boats going past. Or just the tide going in and out, like breathing.’
He always seemed to be at least a few sentences behind her, no matter how hard he tried to keep up. ‘What’s wrong with people seeing you?’
‘Oh, they’re just not supposed to. Not you, though. Obviously. Come on, we ought to be quick. I think Caleb thought there might be other people around.’
‘Other people?’
‘From outside.’
‘You mean like trespassers?’
‘What?’
‘People who aren’t supposed to be here. You know, sneaking in.’
‘Oh. Yes, that happens sometimes. You’ll have to teach me all these words you know. What was that one for being cross? Pist?’
‘Never mind. So Caleb’s a bit paranoid about it, is he?’
‘That’s another one.’
‘What? Oh. OK. I mean, he’s always thinking there’s people trying to break in?’ Did they have to hide Marina away? Was that why her father had seemed so distant and Caleb so unfriendly? Because the girl was as haunted as he was and they had to protect her?
She frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so. But sometimes people do, by accident. From one of the paths. He has to go and steer them away.’
‘Must be a bit difficult in a place this size.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you can’t keep an eye on all of it at once. No wonder he’s a bit para— A bit worried about it.’
‘Oh!’ She sounded like she’d just worked something out. ‘No, he doesn’t have to see everywhere.’
‘What?’
‘Caleb knows whenever anyone’s here.’
‘’cept me!’ said a boy, stepping out onto the path from an evergreen recess.
Gavin jumped so violently he lost his balance and lurched into the wet boughs.
Marina had all but sprung out of her shoes in surprise; now she whirled to face the newcomer, half breathless, half laughing. ‘Horace!’ she shouted.
‘Bet you never saw me.’
‘Of course we didn’t!’
At the word ‘we’ the triumphant grin vanished from the boy’s face. He flicked a suspicious look at Gavin, who was still busy righting himself, brushing his hands on his trousers and kicking clods of wet leaves from his shoes. Though the boy was small, Gav guessed he was not far off Marina’s age, just a couple of years younger than himself. Unlike her (and unlike him) he’d grown into his body. Gav recognised his type from school: a neat, self-possessed, wiry kid. Give him a football and within minutes he’d have been impressing or embarrassing his elders. Noticing how deftly he slipped among the web of curving boughs, Gav thought of the slight figure he’d glimpsed running down the path into the woods as he left Auntie Gwen’s house. It was obvious from his manner that he didn’t want to be seen by anyone else. He had a dark cap pulled low over his forehead. He was an Asian kid – Gav thought maybe Chinese or Japanese. His eyes looked keen. When they met Gavin’s, there was a mixture of curiosity and defiance in them, the boy’s challenge to another, bigger boy.
‘So who’s this then?’
‘Oh, say hi to Gavin. Gavin’s my cousin. Well, close enough. He’s visiting.’
‘Saw you before, didn’t I? Walking down from the lodge earlier on. Bet you’d no idea I was there neither.’
Gavin closed his eyes. It had only been half an hour since he’d felt himself stepping out of his shell, speaking to Marina, but the sudden intrusion of this kid was already making him want to crawl right back in again.