Earth and Air Read online

  “They won’t come back,” she told it. “Let’s go.”

  “Sleep,” said the wizand.

  “Oh. It won’t be just dreaming again? We’re really going to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Sophie climbed into bed with the broom on the duvet beside her, closed her eyes and was instantly asleep. The wizand waited until it sensed that the parents were also sleeping, then woke her by sending a trembling warm sensation into her forearm where it lay against the ash wood. She sat up, fully aware.

  “Can we get through the window, or do we have to go outside?” she asked. “I’d need to turn off the burglar alarm.”

  “Window.”

  She pushed the sash up as far as it would go and picked up the broom again.

  “Naked,” said the wizand.

  “Oh, all right.”

  Her parents considered Sophie a prudish child, but she unhesitatingly stripped off her nightie. As soon as she touched the broom again her body knew what to do. Both hands gripped the handle near the tip. She straddled the stick, as if it had been a hobby horse, and laid herself close along it, with the smooth wood pressing into chest and belly. A word came into her mouth that she had never before spoken. She said it aloud, and as the broom moved softly forward and upward she hooked her right ankle over her left beneath the bunched birch twigs. Together they glided cleanly through the window and into the open.

  It was a chilly February night, with a heavy cloud layer releasing patches of light drizzle, but Sophie felt no cold. Indeed her body seemed to be filling with a tingling warmth, and as their speed increased the rush of the night air over her skin was a delectable coolness around that inward glow. Flying was like all the wonderful moments Sophie had ever known, but better, realer, truer. This was what she was for. Thinking about it beforehand she had imagined that the best part would be looking down from above on familiar landmarks, school and parks and churches small and strange-angled beneath her; but now, absorbed in the ecstasy of the thing itself, she barely noticed any of that until the lit streets disappeared behind her and they were flying low above darkened fields, almost skimming the hedgerow trees.

  The broomstick swerved suddenly aside, and up, curving away, and then curving again and flying far more slowly.

  “What?” it asked.

  Sophie peered ahead and saw a skeletal structure against the glow from the motorway service station.

  “Pylons,” she said. “Dad says they carry electricity around.”

  The broomstick flew along the line of the wires, keeping well clear of them, then circled for height and crossed them with plenty of room to spare. Beyond them it descended and skimmed on westward, rising again to cross the motorway as it headed for the now looming hills.

  It rose effortlessly to climb them, crossed the first ridge and dipped into a deep-shadowed valley. Halfway down the slope it slowed, circled over a dark patch of woodland, and settled down into a clearing among the trees. The moment Sophie’s bare feet touched earth the broom became inert. If she’d let go of it, it would have fallen to the ground.

  She stood and looked around her. It was almost as dark in the clearing as it was beneath the trees, though they were mostly leafless by now. An owl was hooting a little way down the hill. Sophie had never liked the dark, even in the safety of her own bedroom, but she didn’t feel afraid.

  “Can I make light?” she said.

  “Hand. Up,” said the wizand.

  Again her body knew what to do. She raised her right arm above her head, with the wrist bent and the fingers loosely cupped around the palm. Something flowed gently out of the ashwood into the hand that held it, up that arm, across her shoulder blades, on up her raised arm, and into the hand. A pale light glowed between her fingers, slightly cooler than the night air, something like moonlight but with a mauvish tinge, not fierce but strong enough to be reflected from tree trunks deep in the wood.

  There was nothing special about the clearing. It was roughly circular, grassy, with a low mound to one side. A track ran across in front of the mound. It didn’t look as if it was used much. That was all. But the clearing spoke to her, spoke with voices that she couldn’t hear and shapes that she couldn’t see. There was a pressure around her, and a thin, high humming, not reaching her through her ears but sounding inside her head, in the same way that the wizand spoke to her. She wasn’t afraid, but she didn’t like it. She wasn’t ready.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the wizand.

  On the way back the rapture of flight overcame her once more, but this time there was a small part of her that held itself back, so that she was able to think about what was happening to her. It was then that she first began to comprehend something central to her nature, when she saw that the rapture arose not directly from the flying itself, but from the ability to fly, the power. That was what the wizand had meant, when it had first spoken to her. Power.

  Sophie was an intelligent and perceptive child, but hitherto, like most children, she had taken her parents for granted. They were what they were, and there was no need for her to wonder why. The coming of the wizand changed that, because of the need to conceal its existence from them. This meant that Sophie had to think about them, how to handle them, how to make sure they got enough of her to satisfy them, so that they didn’t demand anything she wasn’t prepared to give. Soon she understood them a good deal better than they did her, and realised—as they didn’t, and never would—that there was no way in which she and they could ever be fully at ease with each other. It wasn’t lack of love on their part, or at least what they thought of as love, but it was the wrong sort of love, too involved, to eager to share in all that happened to her, to rejoice in her happinesses and grieve for her miseries. It was, she saw, a way of owning her. She could not allow that.

  Obviously this wasn’t anything she could explain to them, but just as obviously it would be no use her shutting herself up in her room for hours, alone with her broom. She mustn’t even make a particular fuss of it—no more fantastic feats of leaf-sweeping—so she wrote a label for it, “Sophie’s Broom. Do not touch,” and propped it into the corner behind the wardrobe. She made a point of being around whenever she guessed her parents would like her to be, so that they’d be less likely to come looking for her at other times. To minimise intrusions in her absence she started to keep her room clean and neat, and to fold her clothes and put them away.

  Her moodswings became less marked, and she went to bed at the right time without making a fuss—or mostly so, because sometimes she’d throw a minor tantrum, enjoying it in a rather cold-blooded way, so that they wouldn’t start to feel that they no longer had the daughter they were used to. So family tensions eased, and life became more comfortable for all three of them. Her parents, of course, believed that this was their doing, and congratulated themselves on their patient handling of her.

  They were delighted, too, by her sudden hunger for books. She had been slow to start reading, but now caught up rapidly with her age group and overtook most of them. It barely mattered what the book was about. Anything satisfied the hunger, at least momentarily, and then it was back, strong as ever.

  “I suppose witches have to read a lot, to learn how to do stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “The trouble is, there don’t seem to be that sort of books any more. And there aren’t any witches to teach me, either. I mean, not my sort. There are those ones on TV who dance in circles and do chants to the Earth Mother, but that’s different.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose what you’re used to is someone like me going to grown-up witches to learn stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there aren’t any. Not anymore. You’d feel them, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I would. I don’t know how I would, but I would.”

  “Yes.”

  What the wizand in fact sensed was a change far more profound than the mere absence of active symbiotes, and more profound too than the obviou
s physical changes—the chain saw that had felled the ash tree, the huge contraptions that could fly far higher and faster than any broomstick, the flameless warmth in the houses, the night-time glow over the cities—those were superficial. The major change was in people’s minds, their hopes, fears, understandings, beliefs, disbeliefs. The people who had burnt Phyllida Blackett hadn’t known about wizands, but if they had found out they would not have been astonished. To them a wizand would have been something classifiable, a species of wood-demon, to be feared, perhaps, and if possible destroyed, but not incredible. To the people of Sophie’s time a wizand was literally that—incredible. There was no place in their minds for such a concept.

  So the wizand’s first task in this new cycle was to discover as much as it could about those minds, and the only channel through which it could do this was Sophie. Hence her hunger to read. The wizand was not in fact troubled about her education as a witch. Her powers would come.

  Time passed. The family moved south. When Sophie was thirteen her mother came into her room one evening and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes shut and her old broomstick—the one Simon had made for her for that Halloween party at the Cotlands’—across her thighs, and her hands grasping either end. The pose looked otherworldly, hieratic, and in a curious way adult, or possibly ageless.

  Sophie opened her eyes and smiled, perfectly friendly, but made a silent “Shh” with her lips. Her mother returned the smile and backed out.

  “Sorry to shoo you out like that, Ma,” Sophie said when she came downstairs. “I was just meditating. Belinda does it, and I thought I’d give it a go.”

  “With your old witch’s broom?”

  “The woman who explained it to Belinda says it’s sometimes useful to hold onto something—something natural’s best—Belinda uses a rock from the beach—and you sort of put your everyday stuff into that and tell it to stay there while the rest of you gets on with meditating. Anyway, my broomstick feels right. I knew it when it was a tree, remember.”

  “Maybe I should try it.”

  “If you can sit still for long enough. It’s supposed to calm you down.”

  “You don’t need it then. You’re the calmest person I’ve ever met. I don’t know where you get it from.”

  “I have to make up for you and Dad. Shall I lay the table?”

  The bit about Belinda was true, except that Belinda had given up the experiment several months ago. Sophie had kept it in reserve as an explanation, if ever she needed it. And she wasn’t surprised by what her mother had said about her calmness. Her friends had commented on it, and she was aware of it in herself. Nothing that happened to her, or might happen, moment by moment, was of any weight compared to her knowledge of what she was, or rather would be. She was like a seed, waiting to become a tree.

  So, apart from giving in around the end of each October to what seemed to be a seasonal itch to fly, she made no practical use of the broomstick. Instead, every evening, she “meditated” with it across her lap. At first she merely passed on to the wizand all she had learnt during the day, not merely schoolwork and reading, but her interchanges with people, their sayings and doings. Later, when she had had her first period, she began to acquire her powers.

  The wizand didn’t exactly give them to her. They were there, and it showed them to her. It was as if it had shown her how to open a box of specialised instruments. They were, in fact, more like that than anything else she could think of. Though incorporeal, they seemed to her to have the shape and feel of old tools, used and reused by long-dead craftsmen, blades honed and rehoned, handles smoothed and made comfortable to grasp by the endless touch of confident, work-hardened fingers. They were also a kind of knowledge, like mathematical formulae such as builders have used since before the pyramids, but those are things that anyone can acquire. These were Sophie’s, and Sophie’s alone, just as they had belonged exclusively to each of the long line of the wizand’s earlier symbiotes. That was why they were more like tools than formulae. Some of their shapes were very strange. It might be years before Sophie discovered what they were all for.

  More time passed. When Sophie was fifteen she surprised her parents by telling them that she wanted to be a doctor. Simon was a designer, Joanne a history teacher, and they had assumed that when she went to University she would read English, or something like that. But she seemed both assured and determined, as she did about most things, in her quiet way, so they agreed to her taking the necessary A-levels. The wizand, of course, approved. Medical knowledge, though the knowledge itself had changed, was something within its experience. Sophie’s reasons were similar. Healing was one of the things witches did. Medicine would provide a front. Witchcraft might help the healing process. So she worked hard, and got the results she needed in order to have some choice in the university she would go to, back in the north, where both she and the wizand belonged.

  She took the broomstick with her and hung it on the wall of her room. Nobody thought this strange. Students keep all sorts of junk as totemic objects. Most days she meditated. This was equally normal. She made friends, easily, with anyone she liked the look of. It just happened, with no special effort on her part. More unnervingly—though it took a lot to unnerve her, these days—she found that she had only to look at some man with a feeling of mild physical interest on her part, and within a week or two he would have taken steps to get to know her, and be giving clear signals of wishing for something more, though she herself was merely borderline pretty, and that on her best days. She needed the presence of the man himself for this to work. It was no use going to a film and fantasising about Tom Cruise, but if he had happened to be visiting Leeds . . . No, once she’d discovered the effect, she’d have stayed clear. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.

  After a while, very much in a spirit of sober experiment, she allowed some of these encounters to go further. The results could be physically satisfying, but not emotionally, because the men seemed unable to remain at her superficial level of involvement. Instead, whether she went to bed with them or not, they seemed to become not merely passionate but obsessed. She tried the obvious step of initiating the relationship via a carefully controlled fantasy, with definite rules of engagement, but it made no difference.

  “Yes,” said the wizand, when she told it.

  “You mean that’s just how it goes? It’s no use trying to get them to understand I don’t want them to feel like that about me.”

  “Say they don’t,” suggested the wizand.

  “All right,” said Sophie. “I’ll give it a go.”

  She chose an archaeology student called Josh, already on the fringe of her circle, a healthy outdoor type with an affable personality. He had the advantage of being emotionally at a loose end, because his long-time girlfriend had decided to go and be a vet in New Zealand. He was standing at the bar in a pub talking rugby with his mates, with his back to Sophie, when she fantasised about spending a night with him in a tent in an owl-infested wood. Ten minutes later he was sitting at her table. Within a week they were lovers.

  She let his passion run for another ten days and then, one morning while they were dressing for his ritual run (she bicycled beside him for company), she took him by the hands and said, “Look me in the eyes, Josh.”

  He did so, frowning.

  “Josh,” she said slowly and quietly, “you don’t love me anymore.”

  His frown deepened. He shook his head, naively bewildered.

  “No,” he said. “I suppose I don’t. I’m sorry, Sophie.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s fine by me. We can go on as we are, if you want to. Just taking it easy on the emotional bit, if you see what I mean.”

  “All right,” he said. “I suppose it was getting a bit unhealthy.”

  Sophie found the change a considerable improvement on her previous relationships, but it was still not fully satisfying. Josh made the point one evening, speaking thoughtfully out of a long silence.


  “You’ve never been in love, have you, Sophie?”

  “No, I suppose not. Not yet.”

  “I don’t think you know how. You’re just too cool. Not quite human.”

  She’d laughed, but inwardly accepted the point. Not quite human. Something else.

  Despite that, the relationship worked for both of them, a steady companionship without emotional commitment. (Josh was planning to go out to New Zealand when his course ended, if his girlfriend didn’t return before that.) So they were still together at the end of the academic year, and settled in as before at the start of the next term. Towards the end of October they took advantage of a late fine spell to go camping for a long weekend. Sophie chose the location, a valley merely glimpsed on a summer jaunt into the western hills, though the memory of that glimpse had kept sidling into her mind at irrelevant moments since. As she meditated the evening before they left the wizand said “Take me.” It didn’t occur to her not to do so.

  They left the motorway and climbed a side road to a col, then began to descend a boulder-strewn hillside, bare apart from a large patch of old woodland a couple of hundred yards away on the left. Seen from this angle, Sophie recognised the place, recognised it from a single visit thirteen years before, a sulky child, slumped in the back of the car, barely glancing out of the window.

  “Try along there?” she said.

  “It doesn’t look . . .”

  He had already passed the turning. She was forced to use a little of her power, something she had avoided doing to him so far. She laid her fingers on his bare forearm.

  “Please, Josh,” she said.

  He braked, reversed, and turned along the track. It was evidently not much used. The weeds along the centre rasped against the underside of the car. In places, anthills had encroached. Apart from the crawling car the hillside seemed entirely empty. Two sagging strands of rusty barbed wire blocked the entrance to the wood. Josh stopped and craned round to check for a turning place, but Sophie was already out of the car.