“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.