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 between 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.