Carefully she raised her head and looked again. The Community were beginning to move now, all together, a grey mass shapeless as a cloud, crashing through the hedge into the lane, and on through the wall on the other side, tumbling the heavy stones out of their way, then on up the hill, following an ancient track untrodden for three hundred years. There was a gap in the next wall, blocked with barbed wire. The hooked points tore into their flesh as they strode through it, but no blood came. They crossed more fields and started up a bracken-shrouded slope.
The broomstick twitched in Sophie’s hand. She straddled it, laid her body along it and spoke the word. The broomstick swept away and climbed the hill, well to the left of the line the Community was taking. They reached the wood together, and Sophie heard the crash of trampled undergrowth as the heavy remorseless limbs forced their way in under the trees. The broomstick skimmed the treetops, its new-cut birch twigs whistling sweetly wild as they sped through the still night air.
It slowed above the clearing and spiralled down, but before it reached the ground veered upward like a settling bird, allowing Sophie to reach out and grasp the side-branch of a sycamore bough that partly overhung the space below. Before the broomstick lost buoyancy she found a scrabbling foothold and managed to heave herself onto the main bough. She worked herself along it to a point where she would be clear for takeoff, laid her naked body against the flakey bark and drew the broomstick in beneath her right thigh.
The midnight moon shone down into the glade, lighting the tent where Josh lay asleep, and the logpile, and the mound that might once have been a dwelling. A silvery wisp of smoke still rose from the embers of the fire. The strange hum was back inside Sophie’s head, quiet but persistent, with the chanting voice almost audible beneath it. No, more than one voice, several, chanting in unison, strong, quiet voices, certain of what they were doing, as Sophie was not yet certain.
The sounds of trampling drew nearer. Beneath her leg, Sophie felt the broomstick lose the tingle of secret life that was always there when she touched it.
“Hide,” came the toneless voice in her mind.
Yes, she thought. I too have powers that these creatures might sense. She could indeed feel those powers wavering around her, like the tentacles of an anemone in a rock pool, so, just as an anemone does when its pool is disturbed, she retracted the charged network into herself and closed it away. A moment later the leaders of the Community crashed out into the open.
They paused. The grey faces stared at the glade, expressionless, but Sophie sensed a sudden check to the impulse that had drawn them here. They had come to do a particular thing, and found that thing no longer doable. Now they drifted across to the mound. Their groping arms patted the empty air, feeling for lost walls, a vanished door.
They turned and stared around again. For the first time they seemed to see the tent, and drifted towards it. Hands clutched the fabric and wrenched it away. Josh, locked in the sleep spell, didn’t stir. They ringed him round, staring down.
Without word or signal certainty returned. Clay-chill hands seized Josh by the shoulders, dragged him from the sleeping bag and hauled him to his feet. He half woke and stared around, too bewildered for fear. His naked body was bone-white in the moonlight. While two of the creatures held him others turned to the woodpile. They carried the logs to the centre of the clearing and stacked them into a pyramid. Another crouched by the smouldering fire and blew on the embers. Others broke brushwood and piled it on, or stuffed it in among the logs. Smoke rose from the fire, silver white. A flame woke and flared, lighting the glade orange, but the grey bodies showed no tinge of it. Their stuff absorbed the light and sent none back.
When the logs were ready and the fire blazing they dragged Josh to the pile and used the tent cords to lash him spread-eagled against it. His mouth opened and closed in soundless shouts and pleadings. Sophie watched, tense, not with horror but with readiness. She had had no foreknowledge that this was going to happen. She had not brought Josh here to be a sacrifice, and would not have done so if she’d known, but she felt no guilt, only pity for his misfortune.
For herself, though, she felt excitement, eagerness, fulfilment. She was like the child of parents exiled from their country before she was born who has never herself been there, and now stands at last at a frontier station and gazes along a rail track receding through farmland, knowing that if she boards the approaching train it will take her to a life of struggle and danger, but also to the one place where she truly belongs, where she can be her whole self.
When the fire was well alight one of the creatures thrust a dry branch into it, waited for it to blaze up, and carried it flaming towards the pyre.
“Now,” said Sophie in her mind.
In the broomstick the wizand woke. Sophie knelt, crouched, sprang. The broomstick swooped into the glade.
They made no sound, but at once grey faces turned. Grey arms rose in violent gestures, but struck too late as the broomstick whistled between them, levelled for an instant, and rose with Sophie grasping the flaming branch she had snatched as they swept past. Power poured down her arm and into the wood. Its lit end blazed into brilliance, trailing a path of flame behind it as they swung round the glade. Where it had been, the flame remained suspended.
Seven times they circled, building a wall of flame around the glade, prisoning the spellbound figures. When the seventh ring was steady in its place they rose and hovered above the centre. With her bare fingers Sophie broke fiery twigs from the branch and dropped them around the pyre. Where they fell, columns of fire remained, fencing Josh round. Then the broomstick rose higher and swept again round the glade, so that Sophie could reach out with the blazing branch to touch the trees and strip from them a storm of leaves, ash, sycamore, birch, beech, and oak, that spun whirling behind her, lit both by the flame she carried and the weaker fire below.
The humming sound was gone, and the voices were clear in her head, chanting in a language she had never before heard, but whose meaning she knew as if she had spoken it since she could talk. She knew the chanting voices too. They belonged to all the wizand’s earlier symbiotes, of whom she was the latest. Their gathered power was the wizand’s power, and now, while she lived, it was hers. As understanding came to her she joined the chant.
With the first word spoken the leaves fell. They rained down between the inner and the outer fire-rings, onto the reaching arms and the upturned faces and the ponderous bodies. Where they touched the grey flesh it lost its shape and crumbled away, as the bound souls that had held the people into their shapes found their release. Before the last leaf touched the woodland floor the clay-formed mob had vanished. All that was left of them was a layer of fresh earth spread in a ring around the pyre. At the same time the flames died away and the moon shone down on a naked man struggling with the cords that bound him to a pile of logs, until a naked woman walked out of the tree shadows behind him and whispered in his ear, and he slept.
The cords untied themselves at Sophie’s touch. Effortlessly she lifted Josh free and carried him to where the tent had been. She unzipped the sleeping bag, settled him onto it, laid herself along his shuddering body, caressing the spasms into stillness. Then she whispered again in his ear.
“Wake up, Josh. You’ve been having a nightmare.”
“Jesus! Haven’t I just! Let me tell you about it!”
“Not now. In the morning. If you remember. Go back to sleep.”
Obediently he slept. Sophie saw to it that he dreamed kindly dreams. Next, at her wish, the tent reformed itself around them, retying its cords, weaving its torn fabric into seamless sheets, sinking its pegs into the earth around. The log pile stacked itself as it had been, and grass recolonised the naked layer of earth. Housekeeping. The necessary cleanings and tidyings that have to follow any intrusion of supernatural energies into the natural world. In later years Sophie would deal with this kind of thing pretty well automatically, but now, being new to the task, she had to think about what she was doing.