‘Your legs are not tired. Get up. Run from the door to the door, then reverse. We may have just one chance at this, and you must be ready. Up. Up!’
Dalip dragged his bones upright, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides. He started to run.
17
She had to step over a wall that hadn’t been there before. It was just about knee-high, wide enough to have to stand on on the way across it, made of rough stones that were more-or-less fitted together.
Having crossed it and jumped down the other side, she looked back at it. Crows was already heading up the hill, carrying the fish he’d caught◦– she still wasn’t quite sure how◦– while she was paddling up and down in the shallows.
The wall extended left and right. Soil and shrubs were piled up against the inside of the wall, and when she checked, the outside too.
Like it had pushed its way out of the ground.
She looked up the hill. Crows had disappeared into the ruined tower, so she took the opportunity to follow the line. It ran all the way around the tower, following the same contour, and she arrived back where she’d started a few minutes later, breathless and not a little confused.
She climbed after Crows, to find that the wall wasn’t the only addition. There was a new pavement in front of the doorway, and somehow the tower seemed taller and more substantial. If that had been all, she’d have just put it down to her faulty memory, but the circular wall was something else. She hadn’t forgotten it, and neither could she dismiss it.
And inside, the roof, or at least, the floor above, had been repaired. But not in a new wood way. The boards now over her head looked old and tired, the beams supporting them rough and soot-stained.
‘Crows? What the fuck is happening to your castle?’
‘You’ve noticed,’ he called from the back room where he kept his stores.
‘I’m not blind. Or stupid.’ The ceiling was too far away for her to jump up and touch, but it obviously wasn’t at the top of the tower. There were going to be stairs somewhere, and she started searching for them.
She found a dark alcove that, when she looked up into it, she could see faintly. Uneven stone steps led upwards, and with a quick glance behind her, she started up them, hands feeling the way against the walls of the narrow staircase. It grew brighter as she climbed: the stairs ahead of her grew more ragged, until there were whole sections of tread missing, but there was a doorway to her right just before it became unusable. She stepped through, and found she was standing on the boards she’d been looking up at before.
They seemed solid enough when she pressed them with the toe of her boot, and she walked out on to them, listening to them creak softly.
Above her, the crows had moved up a level. There was another threadbare set of rafters hanging from the sockets in the walls, and the birds returning to roost seemed perfectly at home. She paced the square sides of the tower, and ended back at the door.
She wasn’t imagining it, and Crows wasn’t denying it.
‘Dinner is cooking,’ he said, appearing behind her.
‘How is this even possible?’ she asked him, throwing her hands up in disbelief.
He shrugged. ‘I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you how. There are lines of energy that flow under the surface of the land. Where those lines cross, the energy pools as in a well. Miracles happen there.’
‘So, what? The castles just appear?’
‘Yes.’ Crows shrugged again. ‘What can I say? Down was like that before I got here. I did not make the rules.’
‘What about the villages?’
‘Yes, those too. If you stay long enough in one place, a house forms for you. Those are along the lines. Where two or more meet, you get castles.’
‘Fucking hell. That’s crazy. Why isn’t everybody running around trying to find their own castle, then?’
‘As you can imagine, it is not as simple as that.’
‘And this one’s repairing itself because?’
‘Because you are here, Mary. The land responds according to our natures. Some people are weak in magic. Others are strong, like you. You can drink deeply from the well beneath us. The castle was never very big, and I lost heart, so it fell into ruin. Now, it is responding to your presence, and grows once again.’
‘Me? What did I do?’
‘You do not have to do anything. You just have to be.’ Crows tapped his foot on the boards, and they sounded hollowly back.
Mary looked around her with wonder. ‘This grew, out of nothing?’
‘Again, not out of nothing. Out of the ground. It rises and falls with the power of the men or women under its roof.’
She pressed her hand against the wall, where the individual stones fitted with each other in blocks and courses, like a gigantic jigsaw. ‘That is still fucking nuts. So how do you find these lines of energy?’
‘You search for them. Tease them out. Remember how I told you that maps were powerful things? This is why: if you have a map, you can start to find the lines. Once you have drawn the lines, you can find where they cross. Where they cross is where castles rise. And sometimes, you can, if you are clever and you have more complete maps than anyone else, you can find a place that no one else knows of.’
‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘Do I what?’
‘Have maps?’
Crows pursed his lips. ‘I might.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Mary,’ he said. ‘They are fragile, and very precious. They are not objects to be idly toyed with. But perhaps… yes. You must start a map of your own, and mark everything you know of so far on to it. Come, and eat, and then while it is still light, we can make a start.’
Crows wasn’t much of a cook, Mary decided, not that she could do better with the ingredients to hand. There was steamed fish◦– bony and tasting oddly of weeds◦– and boiled grain that was a step firmer than porridge. He thought it was fine: he extracted every last morsel of grey flesh from the skeleton, scooping out the difficult to reach bits near the head with one of his long fingers, and sucking the juices from the tail, all the while using the same fingers to cup small balls of grain and feed them past his white teeth.
If she didn’t eat, she’d be too weak to walk to all the places that Crows thought it necessary to take her to, and too weak to weave fog from the air she breathed and darkness from the shadows she cast.
She could do magic. If that wasn’t astounding enough, the very land itself was magical, with castles springing up from the ground at her unspoken command. Eating some mediocre meals was a small price to pay for such wonders, and she’d do it without complaint.
Then when they’d finished, and she’d washed her face and hands and bowls in what had been that morning, a stream, and was now a stone arch sluicing water down a trough before it turned into a stream, she sat on the still-open doorstep while Crows fetched a sheet of paper and some ink.
She wasn’t sure where he’d get paper from, or pens. They spoke of being manufactured, while everything about Down was crafted◦– handmade, bespoke, using only raw materials.
The ink was made from soot and oils, the pens from strippeddown feathers, and the paper, she was both fascinated and disgusted to learn, was actually a scraped-clean square of animal skin, the size of a school exercise book.
She’d always been an inveterate doodler, tagging everything with the art she saw on the street. This was different. Even the ink was rare and precious, delicate and worryingly permanent. No hesitation, no erasing.
‘How do I do this?’ she asked.
‘You mark down everything you’ve seen, as accurately as possible. Mark where you have walked, the mountains you saw in the distance, the curve of the rivers, the lines of the hills. Guess the distances if you cannot measure them. Start where you started, finish where you are.’