Ellie followed his glance in time to see a large bird launch itself from the top of the oak opposite, glistening with the reflected colours of the western sky—or so she imagined. But when the bird glided down into shadow, the sunset hues stayed with it until it landed, glowing, on the hitching rail beside the door.
Ellie rose—it seemed rude to stay sitting—and stared, her heart pounding. The bird gazed back considering, judging, her.
ʺThis is Sonny,ʺ said Welly’s voice behind her. ʺHe’s the Phoenix. You’ve probably read about him. But I’ve always found it easiest to think of him not as a magical creature out of a story-book, but as a god. He comes from Egypt, where they didn’t have just one god, they had lots. But he’s the only one left. Go closer. He won’t hurt you.ʺ
ʺNo. No. Of course not,ʺ murmured Ellie, allowing her feet to drift her towards the hitching rail. The bird drew itself up and spread its wings wide as she approached, until it seemed to tower over her.
Yes, she thought. It’s a god. Of course.
She bowed her head and the wings swept forward until they lay gently against either side of it, a warm, soft, feathery touch. She felt the bird’s brow against her own, the fringes of its scarlet crest mingling into her hair-line.
They stayed only briefly like that and straightened. Ellie stepped back, feeling not exactly changed, not altered or tampered with, but renewed, fully herself and confident in that selfhood. The gift of the Phoenix. Something she would have until she died.
ʺThat’s ’is blessin’,ʺ said Dave. ʺWorth ’avin’, eh? It’ll be gettin’ cold for ’im now, an’ ’e’ll be wanting to sit on ’is fire, so we’ll be goin’ in an’ we’ll tell you about it all.ʺ
It was well past midnight when Ellie crawled into bed, exhausted beyond belief with the excitement of the day but still for a long while unable to sleep for the muddle of thoughts and memories jostling through her mind. . . .
. . . Sonny, the one and only ever-living Phoenix, blazing on his great mound of embers on the hearth below but filling the whole room with his presence. . . .
. . . Welly and Dave curled up in each other’s arms in their room on the other side of the landing, husband and wife for forty years now, he getting younger all the time, and she getting older, and still in love. . . .
. . . And then, almost word for word in her mind still, what they had told her:
ʺ. . . We’d been together, as people say now, almost since the day we met. I don’t think it was anything Sonny did to us—we just fell for each other, didn’t we, love?ʺ
ʺThat we did. Couldn’t think what were ’appenin’ to me. Thought I were getting’ the ’fluenza, maybe.ʺ
ʺBut we couldn’t get married because of Dave needing to change who he was every twenty years or so. That was tricky enough as it was without my having to account for a series of missing husbands. But then, in the winter of nineteen forty-nine—No, I’d better go back a bit. From the very first I wanted to know as much as I could about Sonny—ʺ
ʺLike that, Welly is. If it aren’t in a book, it aren’t real.ʺ
ʺI started in the library here, reading everything I could find about ancient Egypt, and I advertised for a tutor—we could afford that, because of the very generous arrangements his lordship had made for Dave here—ʺ
ʺSonny payin’ ’is debts, that come from. Showed me a pile of jewels in ’is bonfire ’eap to give to ’is lordship, an’ then ’e said I got to ’ang on to ’alf of ’em—ʺ
ʺAs well as a ninety-nine-year lease on the cottage and the wood. It was still extremely generous, but it meant I could hire a tutor, and I found a wonderful old man, a retired professor of Egyptology who lived in a large old house in Hampstead piled from floor to ceiling with books. I boarded with him all through the war when I was doing war work in one of the ministries. I couldn’t tell him why I wanted to know about the Phoenix, of course, but he got interested and dug out everything he could find, and he taught me to read hieroglyphics, and best of all he got me a place on a dig one of his ex-pupils was running in Heliopolis, and Dave came too—ʺ
ʺWanted to see where Sonny spent ’is winter, a’ course.ʺ
ʺThe earl vouched for him so we could get him a passport because he didn’t have a birth certificate. We used to walk in the desert in the evenings, and Sonny would meet us. He seemed to have much more power there—ʺ
ʺOnly natural, ’im bein’ closer to the sun.ʺ
ʺWe were excavating a temple of Osiris, and he’d come to me in my dreams and show me how it used to look in his day, so they were very glad to have me on the dig because I seemed to be such a lucky guesser—they used to joke about my having second sight. And then on the last night of the year—we’d told them it was our fiftieth birthday, but of course it was really Dave’s hundred and fiftieth, only his fiftieth from when he began to go backwards—ʺ
ʺSonny’s, too.ʺ
ʺIn this cycle, anyway, though . . . Yes, Ellie?ʺ
ʺThey didn’t have our centuries did they? Back in ancient Egypt, I mean.ʺ
ʺTakes what ’e can get. We got centuries now, so that’s what ’e uses.ʺ
ʺHe has to have some kind of a cycle that the humans he lives among find important. In Egypt it was a hundred and twenty years, but it’s centuries now. Anyway, my friends on the dig held a party for us, and when it was over Dave and I walked out into the desert and Sonny met us and took us to his temple. It was buried deep in a dune, but Sonny called and a patch of sand slid away and there was a hole we could crawl through—pitch dark, but as soon as we were in, Sonny blazed into light and there it was. Oh, Ellie, it was perfectly wonderful, quite small, but untouched—never been found by anyone, or looted or excavated. Every wall covered with paintings or hieroglyphics, all looking as if they’d been done yesterday. . . .ʺ
ʺAn’ that’s where ’e married us.ʺ
ʺYes . . . that was where he married us. . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ve never been able to talk to anyone else about it before . . . that’s why I’m crying. It was so beautiful. It sounds lonely, but it wasn’t, because he brought them all back, everyone who’d ever helped him before, the way we’re doing, not to see or hear or feel, but there, crowding into his temple to welcome and bless us, his fortunate, fortunate friends. . . .
ʺOf course, when I got back to England I longed to tell my old professor about it, but I couldn’t. So Sonny sent him a dream instead—ʺ
ʺPayin’ ’is debts again.ʺ
ʺYes. There’s a sacred text carved onto a stele at Luxor. It’s so battered that no one could read it, and scholars had been arguing for years about what it meant. When we got back from Egypt, I found a letter waiting for me from my old professor, telling me that on New Year’s Eve—the night we got married, remember—he’d dreamed he saw the stele as it was when it was new. It seemed to be lit by flame, and he could read it right through. And he was so excited that he woke up and found that he still remembered it, so he switched on his bedside light and wrote it down. He got up next morning thinking it would be complete nonsense, but he looked at it and saw that it must be right. The Society of Egyptologists gave him their Gold Medal for the paper he wrote on it, and he told me that now he could die happy. He was over ninety.ʺ
ʺThat’s lovely!ʺ
ʺThat’s Sonny, that is. You better get on, Welly, or we’ll all be fallin’ asleep.ʺ
ʺYou’re going to tell me why you really want me. Aren’t you?ʺ
A pause, and a sigh from Welly.
ʺWe can’t make ’er. An’ Sonny won’t. Tell ’er that.ʺ
ʺI suppose it’s a place to start. You see, my dear, after that first time, I used to join a dig and go back to Egypt every winter. Dave would come for a little while and I’d take a break to be with him, and wherever my dig was we’d go to Heliopolis and visit Sonny and his temple. So I got to read all the hieroglyphs and the scrolls, one of which was about the temple ritual. The important thing was that there were always two special priests—sometimes one of them was a priestess—and one of them was getting older and the other one was getting younger. And on ritual days, especially the midwinter solstice, the other priests would make a fire on the altar and the Phoenix would appear and bathe in his flames to renew his strength. Then, right at the end of the cycle when one priest was a very old man and the other was a babe in arms, they’d build a special pyre on the altar and on that last midnight they’d lay the baby—the priest who’d been growing younger—on the pyre, and the Phoenix would appear and nestle down onto the baby as if it were brooding a chick. Then, on the stroke of midnight, the baby would be unborn, and the Phoenix would take its spirit into himself and the pyre would burst into flame. In that same instant, somewhere in Egypt, a new baby would be born, and the old priest would start to live backwards.