Last of all, amused, she raised two small irritable bumps on her left arm and let Josh drift into wakefulness. She moved his hand to finger the place.
“You win your dinner,” she whispered.
“Uh?”
“I got bitten.”
“Told you so. Don’t think I did. Great. Couldn’t be better.”
But for him it could. He woke fully and they made love again. This time, coolly, Sophie gave him not only herself, but selves of his own that he had never known were in him, strengths and delicacies, heightened senses and awareness, physical rapture too intense to last, but lasting and developing minute after minute until it died deliciously away. They lay together murmuring and caressing for a while, and then he fell asleep without any prompting from her.
Sophie turned on her back and gazed upward. Gently her fingertips stroked the two mosquito bites. If she’d chosen she could have wished them away, but she didn’t. They were a different sort of housekeeping. Her powers hadn’t been given her to win a bet, however tangential and silly. By the same token Josh must be fully paid, as she had just paid him, for what he had suffered. Simply taking the memory away would not have been enough. There would still have been a debt, though he wouldn’t have known it. No debts. No obligations. No contracts, not with anything natural, anyone human. No loves.
Instead, power. Long ago, when she had asked the wizand whether it had anything to give her besides flight and leaf-sweeping, it had told her power, but not yet. When they had first flown, she had begun to understand its meaning, discovering the joy of flight, but also, more than that joy, the thrilling exhilaration of the power to fly. The same just now. Her body had greatly enjoyed their love-making—why not?—and she had taken pleasure in Josh’s pleasure, but for her the main reward and fulfilment had been the use of her own power to give, or not to give.
And both of those things, the power to fly, the power to give, had been slight and momentary, trivial beside the thing she had discovered last night as she had swooped around the flame-ringed glade, chanting the language that is spoken both by angels and by demons, and the full weight and mass of her inheritance had poured into her, through her, out into the world, an ecstasy immeasurably beyond anything she had just given to Josh, as if she had laid her hand upon the web of forces that stays the material universe into its place, and felt that web vibrating to her touch.
She lost herself for a while, reliving the event. Slowly the memories faded and she returned to the here and now.
It was early dawn. The owls, silenced by the midnight riot, had not returned, but a couple of birds were whistling left over fragments of their full summer song. Sophie lay and thought about herself. No loves? At best, the sort of vague and already regretful affection she felt for Josh? No passions? No ecstasies? Things she could give to Josh, but not to herself? Yes, that was beyond her powers. She could have anything else, fame, wealth, love . . .
Love, without loving in return, is that love?
She sighed, and for a treacherous moment looked back. There had been a child once, difficult, wayward, passionate—what sort of life might she have had, but for the touch of an ash sapling?
If she had wished, Sophie could have summoned out of this very wood the stuff that had been Phyllida Blackett—ashes burnt over three hundred years ago, washed into this earth by winter rains, drawn by summer suns into branch and leaf, fallen and rotted into the earth again, cycle after cycle—summoned them and reformed them and caused Phyllida Blackett to walk once more across this glade, no wraith but the living flesh. It would have taken a tremendous exercise of power, but the power was there, hers.
So, surely, it would have been simple by comparison to call back the child Sophie had been, merely the spirit, for the flesh was already here, now, in this tent, and to let the child inhabit the flesh, imbue it with her old, passionate nature, so that she could love as well as be loved, love Josh, if for a season only, for these two days out only . . .
She wasn’t conscious of having reached out and grasped the broomstick where she had laid it beside the sleeping bag, but she found she had done so, and now the wizand interrupted the reverie, speaking in her mind.
“No. I.”
Automatically Sophie interpreted the two cryptic syllables, but the toneless voice in her head told her nothing of the wizand’s own satisfaction at another phase in its life cycle safely embarked on in last night’s orgasm of transferred powers.
No, that is not for you. Never. I am your lover. I alone. I.
Phase A
Suppose Sophie had chosen, as she now had the power to, to look a generation or two into the future and see what would then have been happening in this glade where she lay, and in the valley beneath it, what might that future have been? If we assume no huge disrupting changes in the culture of the British Isles, and no accident to herself against which even her accumulated powers could not protect her, it would have been something like this:
In the glade itself, on the site of the present mound, stands a modest dwelling, made of modern materials but still very much in the spirit of the cottage in which Phyllida Blackett once lived, small-windowed, neat and unpretentious. Around it, growing surprisingly stoutly in so shaded a spot, is an orderly vegetable garden that includes a large plot of herbs, not all of them culinary.
A woman comes to the door. She is in late middle age, soberly dressed, well kempt and apparently healthy. Despite that there is a worn look about her, not tired, not tense or fretted, but with something of the air of a mediaeval statue on the west front of a great cathedral, purified by time and tempest, though in the woman’s case the weather she has endured has been internal.
She has a broom in her hand with which she sweeps her doorstep. She replaces it behind the door and goes into the wood. There is no need to lock the door. Those brush strokes are ward enough.
Sophie’s foreseeing eye doesn’t follow her, but instead transfers its gaze to the village down the hill. Here not much has visibly changed. The public telephone box is a different shape and colour and is topped by a satellite dish. Most cars are electrical, and so on. But very few of the houses have been much altered, and despite the huge increase, nationwide, in the size of the average village, no new building has taken place here. It looks like a village where nothing much has happened for a long while.
Despite that, it has recently been in the news, thanks to a violent and public squabble between the vicar and his bishop, all the more surprising as the vicar has hitherto been one of those elderly ineffectual priests, drifting towards retirement, and meanwhile conducting soporific church services attended by only a handful of his older parishioners, out of habit. Why should such a man suddenly be granted a vision and a voice, the vision having more, apparently, to do with Satan than with God, but the voice so emphatic, so convinced and convincing, that parishioners who have attended the odd service out of curiosity to observe the change, have continued to come with steadily increasing fervour? And when the bishop, hearing of this, has suggested to the vicar that some of the views expressed are verging on the heretical, have united behind him so unanimously that visiting journalists, looking for a jolly row between entrenched local worthies, have not been able to raise a single quotable slur?
These are early days still. It will be several years before the congregation definitively secedes from the mother church, and becomes more and more exclusive and reclusive as it unconsciously prepares itself to play its part, as necessary to the wizand as either of its two symbiotes, in what will perhaps be the final recurrence of that cyclical outburst of public witch frenzy that has so puzzled the historians of mediaeval Europe.