Earth and Air Read online

  “What can I call him?” he asked. “Did the old Greeks have clowns?”

  “Yes, you’ve got a problem there—not a lot of fun, that lot. Hold it. There was that fellow wrote a play about frogs. Aristo something. Aristotle?”

  “I’ll ask Papa Alexi. I could call him Risto.”

  Three months later came the start of the grape harvest. School was over for the next few weeks, so Steff helped all morning in the vineyard—a cheerful time, with a lot of laughter and chat between the regular farmhands and the casual pickers from the town. But it was clearly going to be a hot and tiring afternoon, and he’d not been looking forward to it when, just as everyone was rousing themselves from the midday break, Nikos said “They’ve more than enough hands here, Steff. They won’t miss two of us. Like to show me how that dog of yours is getting on?”

  This was part of the deal. Not wanting to see a good dog spoiled, Nikos had been a bit reluctant to let Steff train Risto on his own, but he’d agreed to let him do the first stages, learning the simple pipe calls and so on, and see then to see how it had gone. Risto was still more puppy than dog, and still a bit of a clown, but he was a quick and eager learner, and had Ridiki to show him what was expected of him.

  He was also a show-off—part of his clownishness—and in the dogs’ eyes Nikos was the leader of the human pack, and so he really laid it on for him, quivering with excitement as he sat waiting for the last note of each call and then darting into action. He finished with a theatrically stealthy stalk of a rock with a sheepskin draped across it, moving left and right, crouching and moving on, exactly on each call.

  Nikos laughed aloud.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “He’s got the instinct in him, and then some. Never seen a pup that far on. Like to try him on a few live ones?”

  He whistled for his own dog, Ajax, and led the way up to the rough pastures above the vineyards. Risto watched, thrilled and eager, while Ajax cut out three staid old ewes who knew what was expected of them almost as well as he did. Then, at first with Ridiki to guide him but soon on his own, he raced off to team up with Ajax and move the patient sheep across the slope, between two large boulders, round and back before releasing them. He returned panting, delighted with his own achievement, lapping up all the praise Steff could give him.

  “Don’t overdo that,” said Nikos. “He’s big-headed enough for three dogs already. Pretty good, mind you—good as I’ve seen. I’ll tell your uncle you’re doing fine. That’s enough for now. He’s only a pup still, and he’s all in. Not worth going back to the vineyard. Give yourselves a break.”

  So Steff went back to the farm house and settled on a rock in the shade below the terrace to begin his weekly letter to his mother, with Ridiki and Risto curled up either side of him. The evenings were earlier now and the sky was just starting to redden as he gazed out over immense distances of the coastline beneath the sinking sun. Above him on the terrace some of the women were getting things ready for the party Deniakis held every year to celebrate the start of the grape picking. A happy and peaceful evening, but at the same time full of the feel of coming change, of the world readying itself for winter. The bustle on the terrace increased. The first of the workers began to arrive. Risto woke.

  Puppy fashion, he’d forgotten his weariness, couldn’t imagine such a state was possible for him. He looked up at Steff. Not a hope. But there was Ridiki beyond him, still asleep. He pranced round, springy with pent energy, crouched an inch from her nose and snorted. She opened an eye, raised her head and yawned. He rose onto his hind legs and pawed the air. Ridiki looked at Steff—if she’d have been human she’d have shrugged resignedly, Kids!—and she was off, streaking away down the slope into the orchard, jinking in and out between the trees, with Risto after her, sometimes on her tail, sometimes careering on after one of her sudden full-speed turns, braking so frenziedly that at one point he went tumbling head over heels, and then racing to make up the lost ground.

  At that speed they couldn’t keep it up for more than a few minutes and then came back side to side to Steff and sat panting, tongues lolling out, but still bright-eyed with the fun of what they’d been doing. Somebody coughed overhead and he looked up.

  It was his uncle’s new wife, Maria, holding her baby perched on the terrace wall to watch Risto racing around the orchard. There were people who said her mother was a witch and had put a spell on Deniakis to make him fall for someone who wasn’t that young or that pretty, or rich enough to bring him that much of a dowry. But Aunt Nix had told Steff this was nonsense, and they’d been lovers for several years.

  At Steff’s movement she looked down.

  “Playing hunt-puppy all on his own,” she said. “Times I’d almost have sworn I could see the other dog.”

  His hair prickled on his nape.

  “Oh . . . Well, he’s Hera’s great-grandson,” he managed. “Nikos says she used to see ghosts sometimes.”

  Automatically Maria flicked her fingers to keep the ghost clear of her baby. Steff looked down anxiously at Ridiki. Her whole attitude had changed, become quietly solemn. Faintly through her body he could see the shapes of the grass-stems she was lying on.

  Steff nodded and rose. He was ready. Everything seemed to have been telling him that this was the moment. With Risto at his heels he followed her along below the terrace wall, up round the main farmhouse and between the sheds and barns to the fig tree beside the gate. The lower branches had drooped down to fill the gap he’d made when he’d dug her grave, but she snaked in beneath them and curled herself up in the place her flesh-and-bone remains lay arm’s-length down. He knelt and reached in towards her, but from habit withheld his hand just before he reached her. She raised her head and looked him in the eyes.

  “Good-bye, Ridiki,” he said for the third time. “Good-bye, Eurydice.”

  For a moment he thought he felt the feathery touch of her tongue on the back of his fingers, but then Risto, nosing in beside him, licked her firmly on the muzzle and she melted into the ground.

  For a little longer Steff stayed where he was, kneeling by Ridiki’s grave, quietly letting her go. Then he rose and walked slowly back towards the sounds of the party, knowing that he would remember her all his life, but no longer, now, with grief.

  Wizand

  Foreword

  The closest analogy that i can find in the material world for the behaviour of a wizand is that of certain tropical ticks, though the similarity applies only to one part of the life cycle. These ticks hatch from eggs, go through a larval stage, pupate, emerge as adults, and mate. The male then dies. Nothing like this occurs with a wizand.

  Having mated, however, the female tick climbs a grass stem or bush to a suitable height, tenses her limbs to spring, and locks the joints so that the tension is maintained with no further effort on her part. She then goes into a state that cannot be called life, since there are no metabolic processes, but is not death either. It is not known how long she can maintain this condition, but an instance of nine years is recorded.

  At length the necessary stimulus—a warm-blooded animal—comes within range of her senses. Her joints unlock. The released tension hurls her forward, and if all goes well she lands on the creature’s hide, clutches with powerful claws and sinks her modified mouth structure into the skin.

  She distends her body with blood—her one meal as an adult tick—and this provides her with sufficient protein to form her eggs and lay them before she too dies.

  Wizands are asexual, so they do not exactly mate or reproduce. They are technically immortal, but since both of their host organisms are mortal they may perish if they fail to make the transfer to the alternate host before the previous one dies. They do not reproduce in any normal sense, but they might be considered fissiparous, since, on the rare occasions when lightning strikes an ash tree inhabited by a wizand, the wizand is likely to divide into two or more entities. This is not an event that a wizand would in any way welcome, since it involves a proportional division of power be
tween the resulting lesser wizands, but in the old days it used to be just enough to maintain the population.

  Wizands, of course, were always scarce and local, and modern forestry methods—the reduction of woodland, the decline of coppicing, and the introduction of machinery to grub out the roots of felled trees—have reduced their numbers to a point where there are probably not more than half a dozen of them left in the whole of Europe, and because of the very different life expectancy of the two hosts only one or two of these is likely to be in the active phase at any particular time.

  Phase A

  One afternoon, late in October l679, Phyllida Blackett sat by her hearth. Her kettle hissed on the hub. A log flared and flared again, though it had been two years drying in the shed. But Phyllida sat placidly stroking the cat on her lap as if this were an evening like any other.

  As it began to grow dark she took the new broom she had cut and bound—ash handle and birch twigs—and propped it behind the door. She picked up her old broom, carried it out into the wood that surrounded her cottage, and slipped it into the hollow centre of an old ash tree.

  “You bide there and take your rest,” she said. “And luck befall you next time. I’d see to that, did I know how.”

  She was a thoughtful symbiote.

  Later that night, as she had known they would—known from the hiss of the kettle, the flames spurting from the log, the grain of the cat’s fur—the Community of the Elect came up the hill and laid hands on her. While their minister chanted psalms in the belief that he was restraining her powers, they drove a stake into the ground, piled logs from her shed around it, and bound her to the stake with cords that had been nine days soaking in the holy water of their font. Before they fired the wood they searched her cottage, found the broomstick behind the door, and added it to the pile, but not, of course, within her reach.

  A wizand has no ears, so the one in the old broomstick could not be said to have heard Phyllida’s screams, but it sensed them, as it sensed the yells and jeering of the Community, ringing the bonfire. But unlike the exulting mob it knew that the screams were not of agony. Phyllida had both power and knowledge. She had seen to it that she would feel no pain. She could, if she had chosen, have lived longer, either by moving to a different district or by using their joint power and knowledge, hers and the wizand’s, to defend her cottage. But she felt that the time was ripe. It was better to go cleanly like this than to have the Community eventually take her in her helpless senility. The wizand, of course, for its very different reasons, took the same view.

  Still, Phyllida screamed. She could just have well have simply chanted the words that she wove into the screams, but then her jeering captors might have begun to doubt that they were in full control, and themselves fallen silent, and been afraid. Better to harness the anger and frustration and cruelty that streamed out of them as they watched her burn, to add that power to her own, to use it to bind their souls to this place after they died, to hold them back from both heaven and hell and fasten them to the sour clods and granite of this valley for three hundred years and thirty and three more.

  Enormous energies were released by this final exercise of power. As they finished their work the wizand absorbed them into itself. At last, when the screams were silent, the Community trooped back down to their village in a single compact body, moving like sleepwalkers, and the wizand, sated, slipped out of the broomstick into the ash tree itself, found a place close above the bole where it was both safe and comfortable, and let itself drift into torpor.

  Eighty odd years later a young and energetic man inherited the estate. He looked at the abandoned village at the foot of the hill, disliked its aspect, and gave orders for a fresh settlement to be built further down the stream. To provide an economic basis for the villagers he set about a general improvement of the land, the enclosure of fertile areas, and the exploitation of timber resources. Men came to coppice the wood.

  As the first axe bit ringingly into the ash tree the wizand woke and glided down into the base of the bole, just below ground level. Next spring a ring of young shoots sprang from the still-living sapwood beneath the bark. They grew to wands, then poles. When they were an inch or so thick the wizand slid back up into one and waited again.

  Seven times, at twenty-year intervals, the wood was fresh coppiced, but only for two or three years in each cycle were the saplings right for the wizand’s needs, and no possible host came near while that was so. By the time the timber was carted away it was long poles, thicker than a man’s calf, and the wizand, safe in the bole, waited without impatience for the next regrowth.

  The economics of forestry changed again, and the coppicing ceased. It was another hundred and ten years before the ash tree was once more felled. This time it happened with the clamour of an engine, and hooked teeth on a chain that clawed so fast into the trunk that the wizand needed to wake almost fully from its torpor and hurry past before it was trapped above the cut. More engines dragged the timber away, and the shattered wood was left in peace. Next spring, as always, fresh shoots sprang up, ringing the severed bole.

  Phase B

  A man’s voice.

  “These look about the right size. Which one do you want, darling?”

  Another voice, petulant with boredom.

  “I don’t know.”

  The second voice triggered the change. Instantly the wizand was fully alert, waiting, knowing its own needs, just as a returning salmon knows the stream that spawned it. It guided the reaching arm. Through the young bark of the sapling it welcomed palm and fingers. The hand was very small, a child’s, about seven years old, but now that the wizand was properly awake it saw how time was running out. There was little chance of another possible host coming by, and none of the ash tree being coppiced again, before the appointed hour.

  “This one,” said the child’s voice, firmly.

  A light saw bit sweetly in. The wizand stayed above the cut.

  “I’ll carry it,” said the child.

  “If you like. Just don’t get it between your legs. Or mine. Now what we want next is a birch tree, and some good hemp cord. None of your nasty nylon—not for a witch’s broom.”

  When the children came in from their trick-or-treating the several witches piled their brooms together. As they were leaving, a child happened to pick out the wrong one. She let go and snatched her hand back with a yelp.

  “It bit me,” she said, and started to cry, more frightened than hurt.

  “Of course it did,” said Sophie Winner. “That’s my broom. It won’t let anyone else touch it.”

  They thought she was joking, of course, and later that evening Simon and Joanne Winner found it gratifying that Sophie was so pleased with her new broom that she took it up to bed with her, and went upstairs without any of the usual sulkings and dallyings.

  Sophie dreamed that night about flying. It was a dream she’d had before, so often that she thought she’d been born with it.

  The wizand was always cautious with a fresh symbiote. The revelation, when it came, was likely to be a double shock, with the discovery both of the wizand’s existence, and of the symbiote’s true self. But hitherto the girl had always been around puberty. It had never dealt with a child as young as Sophie, with her preconceptions unhardened. If anything, it was she who surprised the wizand.

  A fortnight after Halloween she took her broom into the back garden, saying that she was going to sweep the leaves off the lawn.

  “If you like,” said her father, laughing. “They’ll blow around a bit in this wind, but give it a go.”

  He went to fetch his video camera.

  The wizand could have swept the lawn on its own, but with her parents watching through the patio window Sophie kept firm hold of it, following its movements like a dancing partner, while it used the wind to gather the leaves into three neat piles in places where they would no longer blow around.

  “It’s wonderful what a kid can do by way of work, provided she thinks she’s playing,”
said her father. He was the sort of parent that hides from himself the knowledge that his relationship with his own child is not what it should be by theorising about the behaviour of children in general.

  When she’d finished, Sophie went up to her room and sat cross-legged and straight-backed in the middle of the floor, with the broom across her thighs and her hands grasping the stick at either end. She waited.

  “Yes?” said the wizand.

  Sophie heard the toneless syllable as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud, but knew that it hadn’t come to her through her ears. She answered in the same manner, inside her head.

  “I knew you were there. The moment I touched the tree. I felt you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you? A demon or something?”

  “Wizand.”

  Sophie accepted the unfamiliar word without query.

  “Am I a witch?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Can we fly?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d need to be invisible.”

  “No.”

  “But . . . Oh, you mean you can’t do that? Couldn’t I?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You can fly, and you can sweep. Anything else?”

  “Power.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Not yet.”

  Sophie felt relieved. She didn’t know why.

  “We’d better wait for a dark night,” she said.

  Sophie chose a Friday, so that she could lie in on Saturday morning. She went to bed early and waited for her parents to come in and say goodnight. As soon as the door closed behind them she fetched her broom from the corner beside the wardrobe.