‘Look,’ she said.
There was a spreading patch of blood, already the size of a dinner plate, on her dress from the stomach to the groin.
‘It fell dead at my feet,’ Moon said, ‘out of the sky. Isn’t that incredible?’
‘Is it?’ Lol said faintly. Appalled to see that her left hand, bloodied to the wrist, was actually moving inside the body of the crow. Loose feathers were sticking to the blood on her dress.
‘To the ancient Celts the crow or raven was a sacred and prophetic bird.’ Moon spoke as though she was addressing not one person but a group of students in a lecture room. ‘The hero Bran was possibly a personification of a raven god. There were also several crow or raven goddesses: Macha, Nemain, Badb and the Morrigan.’
Lol stood up but moved no closer to her.
‘It fell dead at my feet,’ she said again. ‘It was a gift – from the ancestors. A greeting on this the day of my homecoming.’
‘Like a housewarming present,’ Lol said before he could think.
He expected her to flare up, but she smiled and her eyes glowed.
‘Yes!’ She looked at Lol for the first time, and began to cry. ‘Oh, Lol, I can’t tell you. I can’t express…’
Her hand came out of the crow then, full of organs and intestines and bloody gunge.
Lol felt sick. ‘Moon, if it’s a gift—’
‘The gift,’ Moon said happily, ‘is prophecy! And inner vision. The point is that the crow was endowed with supernatural powers. It was honoured and feared and revered, OK? When this one fell to the earth, it was still warm and there was a small wound in the abdomen and I put my little finger into the wound and it just…’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because it was meant, of course! By bathing my hands in its blood, I’m acquiring its powers. There’s a legend of Cuchulainn, where he does that. I…’ She held out the bird to Lol. ‘I don’t know what to do next.’
‘Bury it, I think,’ Lol said hopefully.
And Moon nodded, smiling through her tears.
Lol let her put the mutilated bird into his hands, trying not to look at it, fixing his gaze out over the city, where the Cathedral tower still merged with the steeple of All Saints under an orange-brown cloudbank.
Down below the ramparts, in the bowl of the ancient camp, they covered the crow with damp, fallen leaves. Lol wondered if maybe he should say some kind of prayer, but couldn’t think of one.
‘You’ll fly again,’ he said lamely to the leafy mound. ‘You will.’
He felt dazed and inadequate. Poor crow.
Poor bloody Moon.
She stood up, her long grey dress hemmed with mud. As he followed her out of the hollow, Lol thought of Merrily Watkins, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving Ledwardine. Would a priest conduct a funeral service for a carrion crow? He thought Merrily would.
Moon gathered her dark woollen shawl around her. Numbed, he followed her along the slippery path. Ahead of them was a nowfamiliar oak tree with the single dead branch pointing out of the top like a finger from a fist. This was where another steep, secret path dropped towards Moon’s new home in its dripping dell.
When the path curved to the left, and the barn’s metal flue poked out of the trees, Moon’s mood changed. Her face was a tremulous dawn.
‘I still can’t believe it.’ She stopped where the path became a series of long, shallow earthen steps held up by stones and rotting boards. ‘I’m back. I’m really back. And they want me back. They’ve given me their sign. Isn’t that just…?’ Moon shook her head, blown away.
Leaving Lol in a quandary – his hands sticky with crow bits and blood. Should he tell Denny about this? Or just Dick? Or not mention it at all?
‘I’d like to sleep now, Lol,’ Moon said.
‘Good idea,’ he said gratefully.
‘I can’t tell you how wonderful I feel.’
‘Good,’ Lol said. ‘That’s, er… good.’
Driving the old Astra back through the semi-industrial sprawl of Rotherwas and into the city, he couldn’t even think about it. He thought instead about stupid things, like maybe buying a bike, too, and getting fit like Moon who insisted she’d be pedalling to the shop in Capuchin Lane six days a week all through the coming winter.
He parked in a private yard behind the shop, in a spot which would have been Moon’s if she possessed a car, and he walked through an alley and into Capuchin Lane. It was also known these days as Church Street, but he and Moon both preferred its old name.
This was a wonderful street to live in: narrow, ancient, cobbled and closed to traffic, full of little shops and pubs, and ending at the Cathedral – presenting, in fact, the most medieval view of it, especially at dawn and in the evening when all the shops were closed and the hanging signs became black, romantic silhouettes.
The flat over the shop called John Barleycorn – one of Moon’s brother’s shops – had been semi-derelict when Moon had first lived here. This was when she was helping with the archaeological excavation in the Cathedral Close, before the digging site was released for a new building to house the Mappa Mundi and the Chained Library. More than a thousand skeletons had been unearthed, and Moon had spent her days among the dead and her nights on a camp bed in this same flat. Walking out each morning to the Cathedral – the dream developing.
She kept a photograph of herself holding two medieval skulls from the massive charnel pit they’d found – all three of them wearing damaged grins. When the excavation ended and the bones were removed, Moon wanted to stay on there and Denny wanted her to leave, so there was tension, and soon afterwards Moon stole the skirts from Next, and the police found her stoned on the Castle Green. And that was when Dick had finally agreed to renovate the flat over the shop as a proper home for her.
Moon had seemed fairly content here in Capuchin Lane. Only Dinedor Hill, in fact, could have lured her away – and it did.
Lol, in need of somewhere to live, had then himself taken over the flat. Denny was glad about that, as it meant Lol could keep an eye on Moon during her working hours, and watch out for any hovering dope-dealers.
He had his key to the side door, but went in through the shop to report to Denny.
Moon’s much older, and very much bulkier, brother sat on a stool behind the counter, trying to tune a balalaika. Although there was only one customer in the store, a girl flicking through the CDs, it seemed quite full; for in a street of small shops this was the very smallest. And it was full of the busy sound of Gomez from big speakers – and Denny was here, a one-man crowd in himself.
‘It go all right then, my old mate?’
‘Fine.’
‘Shit.’
As well as this shop, Denny ran a specialist hi-fi business, and his own recording studio in the cellar of his house up towards Breinton. Lol had produced a couple of albums for him there: local bands, limited editions. Denny was keen to get him back on to the studio floor, but Lol wasn’t ready yet; the songs weren’t quite there – something still missing.
Denny said, ‘No fights, breakages, tears?’
‘Would you count tears of joy?’
‘Shit.’
Lol decided to keep quiet about the crow.
Denny twanged the balalaika and winced. ‘Don’t get yourself too comfy in that flat, mate. She changes like the wind, my little sister.’ He shook his bald head, and his gold-plated novelty earring swung like a tiny censer.
‘You hope.’ Lol couldn’t remember feeling exactly comfy anywhere.
‘Yeah,’ Denny said. ‘Don’t go back, that’s my philosophy. Never in life do you fucking well go back.’
Lol shrugged, helpless. ‘Whatever that place does to you, it has the opposite effect on her. You can’t get around it: she’s happy. She walks into the woods, up to the camp—’