Earth and Air Read online

  “For heaven’s sake . . .” he called as she disentangled the loose post at one side of the entrance and dragged the wire clear, as she’d seen her father do thirteen years ago. She heard his call as if from much further away, but ignored it and walked on into the wood.

  Fifty yards in, the track crossed a clearing, floored with the sort of fine, pale grass that grows in places mainly shadowed from the sun. To the right of it, at the edge of the trees, rose a low mound with a dip in the centre. There was a pile of cordwood stacked beside the track, ready for carting away.

  Sophie stopped and looked around. Now there were two layers of recognition, both from thirteen years before, two visits, once by daylight with her father, once at midnight with the wizand. She hadn’t connected them at the time, but now the memory of the second visit was far the stronger. She could hear, though far more faintly this time, the same high humming inside her head, and feel that nameless pressure all around her.

  Josh came up behind her.

  “What’s up?” he said

  He was so good natured that crossness didn’t sound right in his voice—more as if he were putting it on because she was treating him badly and it was his duty to be cross about it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just remembered. I came here once with my father. I went into a sort of daze, remembering. I suppose that’s some sort of burial mound over there.”

  “Don’t get them round here. It’s probably a collapsed building. The high bit outside was the walls, and the dip’s where the roof fell in. There’s a deserted village down by the stream, if I’m thinking of the right place. Doctor Wedlow was going to lead a dig there, but something stopped it.”

  “Can we camp here?”

  He sighed. It wasn’t his idea of a camping place. He liked open, windy uplands.

  “If you want to be eaten to death by mosquitoes,” he said.

  “There won’t be any. I bet you.”

  “How much?”

  “Dinner at Shastri’s?”

  “So I’ve got to be eaten before I can eat? Oh, all right. I’ll get the car.”

  “Don’t bring it all the way. Leave it on the track.”

  She didn’t move. Dimly she heard the engine start, and stop. Josh’s voice spoke behind her.

  “What on earth did you put this in for?”

  She didn’t trouble to turn and look.

  “It’s due some fresh birch twigs. I’ll use the old ones to light the fire.”

  Sophie pulled herself out of her half trance and helped set up the tent, and then to gather firewood. Josh liked to cook on these occasions, so she left him to fry sausages and chips and construct one of his pungent sauces while she cut twigs from a fallen birch beside the track. As she sat cross legged with the broomstick across her lap and shaped and bound the bundle into place, the yellow circular leaves fell from the twigs and scattered in a pattern around her, like iron filings round a magnet.

  “Wake,” said the wizand in her mind.

  “How long?”

  “Before midnight.”

  They opened a bottle of Rioja and ate by firelight, then sat companionably with a Jean Redpath tape playing, accompanied by owls, while they finished the wine. The high humming was louder now in Sophie’s head, neither threatening nor benign, but with a meaning she couldn’t interpret. She was aware, too, that she was using Josh for some purpose of the wizand’s, and therefore of hers, but she didn’t yet know what it was. Though she felt no guilt about this, she knew she must have no encumbrances, and therefore must repay all debts, so she troubled to attend to Josh and fit cheerfully into his mood, and when they went to bed to see to it that he was well satisfied. By now three owls were hooting from different parts of the wood and she could almost hear the mutter of a voice whispering some chant beneath the humming sound.

  She knew at once when the time came, and turned Josh onto his back, leaned over him, pulled both eyelids down with her fingertip, whispered “Now sleep,” and kissed him. Before she had withdrawn her lips he was asleep.

  She wormed out of the sleeping bag and crawled naked from the tent. The broomstick leaned by the entrance. She took it to the mound, straddled it, leaned forward and whispered the word. The broomstick surged forward and up in a tight spiral to clear the trees. It was a full moon night, very bright, on the verge of frost. A few lights still glowed from the village a mile down the valley, and others speckled the darkness of the opposite slope. The broomstick headed directly downhill, flying only a few feet clear of the treetops.

  Below the wood was a stretch of bare slope, and then small, stonewalled fields running along the bottom of the valley. Among them was an isolated copse, much smaller but even darker than the wood they had left. The broomstick headed directly for it, and as they came nearer Sophie saw that the trees were ancient yews, unlikely to be found growing wild in such a place, though there was no visible reason why anyone should have planted them there. A large modern prefabricated shed stood in the corner of the next field.

  “There,” said Sophie.

  The broomstick swung aside, skimmed the roof of the shed, slowing all the time until she could alight as if from a still gently moving bicycle. At once it lost all buoyancy and became an apparently inert object. She laid it down and settled herself at the edge of the roof with her legs dangling into space, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist. The shed stood in its own patch of ground, rutted with wheel tracks and cluttered with bits of farm machinery, most of them engulfed in a tangle of brambles and nettles. The yew copse was immediately beyond the fence. The humming in Sophie’s head had quieted as soon as they had left the clearing, to be replaced by a tenseness of expectation, a heavy stillness that spoke to her, saying “Wait.” She was strongly aware of this being the appointed place and hour, but knew nothing of the event, and did not try to guess.

  Time passed, enough for the moonshadows on the mat of ivy beneath the yews to have visibly shifted before the church clock in the village down the valley began to strike the midnight quarters. As the chimes floated past her the nape of Sophie’s neck crawled, and her jaw muscles stiffened. She swallowed twice to ease them, then rose and moved back, crouching to peer over the rim of the roof. Her hand felt for the broomstick and gripped it.

  In the pause that followed the quarters the ivy seemed to stir, as if a lot of small creatures were scurrying among it. As the first stroke of the hour reached the forgotten cemetery the tangled mat erupted and burst apart and the buried but never fully dead Community crawled into the air. The chill of the night changed its nature as the clean winter air mingled with the heavier cold of deep earth.

  There was no reek of decay, because the flesh had not decayed, though the shrouds in which it had been buried had rotted centuries ago. But the bodies had held their shape, absorbing into themselves the weight and dullness of the clay in which they had lain, until they had become something like soft fossils.

  Now they rose and moved into the open, grey in the moonlight, naked. They stared around. Who knows what they saw? The shadowy roofs and walls of the village where they had lived their human lives? Or the night as it now was, with only the old yews to mark their graveyard, and the strange-shaped modern barn beside it?

  Sophie saw the grey faces begin to turn towards her and ducked down out of sight. Her throat was dry and her heart hammered. In her night flyings in other years she had felt the excitement of adventure, but never any fear, because she had always had the confidence that her powers, with the wizand’s, were more than enough to keep her out of danger. But this time she understood she was in the presence of something whose power, whatever it consisted in, was at least equal to her own.

  Carefully she raised her head and looked again. The Community were beginning to move now, all together, a grey mass shapeless as a cloud, crashing through the hedge into the lane, and on through the wall on the other side, tumbling the heavy stones out of their way, then on up the hill, following an ancient track untrodden for three hu
ndred years. There was a gap in the next wall, blocked with barbed wire. The hooked points tore into their flesh as they strode through it, but no blood came. They crossed more fields and started up a bracken-shrouded slope.

  The broomstick twitched in Sophie’s hand. She straddled it, laid her body along it and spoke the word. The broomstick swept away and climbed the hill, well to the left of the line the Community was taking. They reached the wood together, and Sophie heard the crash of trampled undergrowth as the heavy remorseless limbs forced their way in under the trees. The broomstick skimmed the treetops, its new-cut birch twigs whistling sweetly wild as they sped through the still night air.

  It slowed above the clearing and spiralled down, but before it reached the ground veered upward like a settling bird, allowing Sophie to reach out and grasp the side-branch of a sycamore bough that partly overhung the space below. Before the broomstick lost buoyancy she found a scrabbling foothold and managed to heave herself onto the main bough. She worked herself along it to a point where she would be clear for takeoff, laid her naked body against the flakey bark and drew the broomstick in beneath her right thigh.

  The midnight moon shone down into the glade, lighting the tent where Josh lay asleep, and the logpile, and the mound that might once have been a dwelling. A silvery wisp of smoke still rose from the embers of the fire. The strange hum was back inside Sophie’s head, quiet but persistent, with the chanting voice almost audible beneath it. No, more than one voice, several, chanting in unison, strong, quiet voices, certain of what they were doing, as Sophie was not yet certain.

  The sounds of trampling drew nearer. Beneath her leg, Sophie felt the broomstick lose the tingle of secret life that was always there when she touched it.

  “Hide,” came the toneless voice in her mind.

  Yes, she thought. I too have powers that these creatures might sense. She could indeed feel those powers wavering around her, like the tentacles of an anemone in a rock pool, so, just as an anemone does when its pool is disturbed, she retracted the charged network into herself and closed it away. A moment later the leaders of the Community crashed out into the open.

  They paused. The grey faces stared at the glade, expressionless, but Sophie sensed a sudden check to the impulse that had drawn them here. They had come to do a particular thing, and found that thing no longer doable. Now they drifted across to the mound. Their groping arms patted the empty air, feeling for lost walls, a vanished door.

  They turned and stared around again. For the first time they seemed to see the tent, and drifted towards it. Hands clutched the fabric and wrenched it away. Josh, locked in the sleep spell, didn’t stir. They ringed him round, staring down.

  Without word or signal certainty returned. Clay-chill hands seized Josh by the shoulders, dragged him from the sleeping bag and hauled him to his feet. He half woke and stared around, too bewildered for fear. His naked body was bone-white in the moonlight. While two of the creatures held him others turned to the woodpile. They carried the logs to the centre of the clearing and stacked them into a pyramid. Another crouched by the smouldering fire and blew on the embers. Others broke brushwood and piled it on, or stuffed it in among the logs. Smoke rose from the fire, silver white. A flame woke and flared, lighting the glade orange, but the grey bodies showed no tinge of it. Their stuff absorbed the light and sent none back.

  When the logs were ready and the fire blazing they dragged Josh to the pile and used the tent cords to lash him spread-eagled against it. His mouth opened and closed in soundless shouts and pleadings. Sophie watched, tense, not with horror but with readiness. She had had no foreknowledge that this was going to happen. She had not brought Josh here to be a sacrifice, and would not have done so if she’d known, but she felt no guilt, only pity for his misfortune.

  For herself, though, she felt excitement, eagerness, fulfilment. She was like the child of parents exiled from their country before she was born who has never herself been there, and now stands at last at a frontier station and gazes along a rail track receding through farmland, knowing that if she boards the approaching train it will take her to a life of struggle and danger, but also to the one place where she truly belongs, where she can be her whole self.

  When the fire was well alight one of the creatures thrust a dry branch into it, waited for it to blaze up, and carried it flaming towards the pyre.

  “Now,” said Sophie in her mind.

  In the broomstick the wizand woke. Sophie knelt, crouched, sprang. The broomstick swooped into the glade.

  They made no sound, but at once grey faces turned. Grey arms rose in violent gestures, but struck too late as the broomstick whistled between them, levelled for an instant, and rose with Sophie grasping the flaming branch she had snatched as they swept past. Power poured down her arm and into the wood. Its lit end blazed into brilliance, trailing a path of flame behind it as they swung round the glade. Where it had been, the flame remained suspended.

  Seven times they circled, building a wall of flame around the glade, prisoning the spellbound figures. When the seventh ring was steady in its place they rose and hovered above the centre. With her bare fingers Sophie broke fiery twigs from the branch and dropped them around the pyre. Where they fell, columns of fire remained, fencing Josh round. Then the broomstick rose higher and swept again round the glade, so that Sophie could reach out with the blazing branch to touch the trees and strip from them a storm of leaves, ash, sycamore, birch, beech, and oak, that spun whirling behind her, lit both by the flame she carried and the weaker fire below.

  The humming sound was gone, and the voices were clear in her head, chanting in a language she had never before heard, but whose meaning she knew as if she had spoken it since she could talk. She knew the chanting voices too. They belonged to all the wizand’s earlier symbiotes, of whom she was the latest. Their gathered power was the wizand’s power, and now, while she lived, it was hers. As understanding came to her she joined the chant.

  With the first word spoken the leaves fell. They rained down between the inner and the outer fire-rings, onto the reaching arms and the upturned faces and the ponderous bodies. Where they touched the grey flesh it lost its shape and crumbled away, as the bound souls that had held the people into their shapes found their release. Before the last leaf touched the woodland floor the clay-formed mob had vanished. All that was left of them was a layer of fresh earth spread in a ring around the pyre. At the same time the flames died away and the moon shone down on a naked man struggling with the cords that bound him to a pile of logs, until a naked woman walked out of the tree shadows behind him and whispered in his ear, and he slept.

  The cords untied themselves at Sophie’s touch. Effortlessly she lifted Josh free and carried him to where the tent had been. She unzipped the sleeping bag, settled him onto it, laid herself along his shuddering body, caressing the spasms into stillness. Then she whispered again in his ear.

  “Wake up, Josh. You’ve been having a nightmare.”

  “Jesus! Haven’t I just! Let me tell you about it!”

  “Not now. In the morning. If you remember. Go back to sleep.”

  Obediently he slept. Sophie saw to it that he dreamed kindly dreams. Next, at her wish, the tent reformed itself around them, retying its cords, weaving its torn fabric into seamless sheets, sinking its pegs into the earth around. The log pile stacked itself as it had been, and grass recolonised the naked layer of earth. Housekeeping. The necessary cleanings and tidyings that have to follow any intrusion of supernatural energies into the natural world. In later years Sophie would deal with this kind of thing pretty well automatically, but now, being new to the task, she had to think about what she was doing.

  Last of all, amused, she raised two small irritable bumps on her left arm and let Josh drift into wakefulness. She moved his hand to finger the place.

  “You win your dinner,” she whispered.

  “Uh?”

  “I got bitten.”

  “Told you so. Don’t think I did. Great
. Couldn’t be better.”

  But for him it could. He woke fully and they made love again. This time, coolly, Sophie gave him not only herself, but selves of his own that he had never known were in him, strengths and delicacies, heightened senses and awareness, physical rapture too intense to last, but lasting and developing minute after minute until it died deliciously away. They lay together murmuring and caressing for a while, and then he fell asleep without any prompting from her.

  Sophie turned on her back and gazed upward. Gently her fingertips stroked the two mosquito bites. If she’d chosen she could have wished them away, but she didn’t. They were a different sort of housekeeping. Her powers hadn’t been given her to win a bet, however tangential and silly. By the same token Josh must be fully paid, as she had just paid him, for what he had suffered. Simply taking the memory away would not have been enough. There would still have been a debt, though he wouldn’t have known it. No debts. No obligations. No contracts, not with anything natural, anyone human. No loves.

  Instead, power. Long ago, when she had asked the wizand whether it had anything to give her besides flight and leaf-sweeping, it had told her power, but not yet. When they had first flown, she had begun to understand its meaning, discovering the joy of flight, but also, more than that joy, the thrilling exhilaration of the power to fly. The same just now. Her body had greatly enjoyed their love-making—why not?—and she had taken pleasure in Josh’s pleasure, but for her the main reward and fulfilment had been the use of her own power to give, or not to give.

  And both of those things, the power to fly, the power to give, had been slight and momentary, trivial beside the thing she had discovered last night as she had swooped around the flame-ringed glade, chanting the language that is spoken both by angels and by demons, and the full weight and mass of her inheritance had poured into her, through her, out into the world, an ecstasy immeasurably beyond anything she had just given to Josh, as if she had laid her hand upon the web of forces that stays the material universe into its place, and felt that web vibrating to her touch.