Advent (46 page)

 
Carrying his shoes, he wandered over to the jetty. He felt conspicuous, although the only other person in sight was the man with the inflatable. He was climbing into it. His bulk made it look bathtub-sized and about as seaworthy. It lolled and wallowed as he fitted a pair of plastic oars and pushed out into the shallows.

 
The slats of the jetty felt icy under Gav’s bare feet. He resisted the urge to put his shoes back on. One thing at a time, he told himself; one thing at a time. The next thing was to get across this river. There was a small sign lashed to the end of the floating dock, looking like it might be displaying a timetable. Of course, he thought as he walked out to investigate, I don’t have any money. I don’t have anything. But what else was he going to do? Turn back? Put his shoes on, go up the hill again, along the lane to Hester’s house, apologise for sneaking out, ask her to take him to the station and buy him a ticket so he could go back home and be Gavin and spend the rest of his life pretending none of this ever happened?

 
The sign was indeed a ferry timetable, as he’d hoped, but that was as far as his hopes were met.

 
Seasonal service
, it read.
May to September
.

 
So much for his first step.

 
He looked across the river, feeling as useless as he ever had. A faint mistiness was creeping into the day, the light whitening and thinning. Hester had mentioned something about how long a journey it was if you went round by road. Miles. There was all day to walk, but the idea of returning to Pendurra at twilight or in darkness was almost as bad as the thought of going home. He crossed his arms on the rail of the jetty and bent down, closing his eyes, banging his head on his knuckles in frustration.

 
When he opened them again, he saw something moving in the water.

 
His first thought was that it must be a seal, right here by the dock. That thought lasted less than a few heartbeats.

 
The submerged shadow grew beneath him and rose. The head that broke the surface was sleek and wide-eyed and mournful as a seal’s, but it belonged to no animal.

 
A human face looked up at him from the water.

 
Or it was what a human face would be if it had hardened to marble and then eroded for centuries under the ebb and flow of the tides. Hair like a thick fringe of pale green river-weeds floated around it. Pearlescent eyes, blinking slowly, fixed on him. It rose a little higher, the drifting fronds making long, lazy curls on the water’s surface. Its pallid mouth opened and made a bubbling whisper Gawain could scarcely hear. The air seemed full of noise, though it was no more than the cries of gulls and the intermittent sounds of the village behind, someone shouting to someone else, a car starting further up the hill; but enough to drown out the voice from below. He knelt down and hung his head over the edge of the jetty, close to the alabaster face.

 
‘Hey!’ Someone was shouting, closer behind him.

 
The mother-of-pearl eyes fixed on him. The pallid mouth worked slowly, fish-like, releasing a bubble of air. He thought he heard words, faint as the pop of the bubble.

 
‘. . . find my child . . .’

Twenty-one

Four hundred and seventy-four years

As the magus
had unwittingly foretold, the prophetess was forgotten.

 
The ring she bore, the open passage between mankind and the rest of the living universe, lay sunk in the rocky shallows where Master John Fiste (formerly Doctor Johann Faust) had drowned, sealed up for centuries in its cocoon of enchantments. As well as the greatest magus in the world, he was also – for centuries – the last. His name became a byword for the end of magic.

 
Its vestiges withered and rotted, or were gathered up and destroyed, weeds in the garden of knowledge. The subtle presences of the world, those things that could not be measured or counted or reasoned, were forgotten too. Some guessed, perhaps, that something had gone out of the world, but subtle absences are not easily felt, and forgotten things often disappear as if they had never existed at all.

 
Wise and brilliant people had no reason to worry themselves over a loss. Their world was filling with new things. They charted them, recorded them, named them, drew them, catalogued them, studied them, calculated their motions, pondered their rights and wrongs, bought and sold and bequeathed them, assembling a new world the way printers’ men plucked the type from their boxes and turned the fragments of metal into great volumes of authority and permanence. What the new age wanted were tools: hard, persistent things that did what you wanted them to do without getting in the way. Magic had never been a good tool. What use was a power that set its own conditions? What good was a knowledge that kept itself secret and shied away from plain words? Who wanted a voice like ancient Cassandra’s, always right but never heeded?

 
So, her gift was forgotten. Her curse was complete. The truth she had carried since the beginning of history was no longer even true. She faded from the world, becoming a ghost, a trace, like a carved and painted idol eroded by wind and sand until it looks no different from the rest of the desert rubble.

 
The last place she might have been seen was on the banks of the shaded estuary near where the magus’s ship had foundered. There were legends that told of a ragged woman walking there alone, as if in mourning. People said she appeared and vanished like a vision. It was a time of bitter doubt, and faith just as bitter. The king’s men had ridden down only that year to drive out the monks, and the truth seemed as open to question as the land. Many claimed that the apparition was a saint: the Magdalene, they swore, full of grief.

 
In tribute to those legends, some decades later, a shrine was built in the woods. The lord of the land at the time followed the old faith and was eager to remember that a saint had appeared in his demesne in his grandfather’s time; but not too eager. There were burnings and executions in the cities, after all. So the chapel was a modest sanctuary of wood and stone, far from the roads. A pool was made to catch the water from a spring, and the walls were raised round it. The water, they said, was blessed by the saint’s hand. It saved the lord and his family from the plague when it came up the river, but this too was a secret best kept within the shade of the old trees. Everyone agreed that the age of miracles had passed. It was unwise to attract attention. The lords remembered that their family had been granted the estates only because the monks with their old devotions had fallen foul of the king. They had no wish to lose them again.

 
A habit of secrecy, a close-mouthed character, seemed to pass down through them, inherited from one to the next along with the woods and pastures. The river was a busy thoroughfare in those days, unrecognisable from the wind-ruffled strip of silence Gawain contemplated from the ferry dock. On any day it was cluttered with masts as if another spindly wood were trying to take root there, and all along its inland banks there were wharves and quays with tracks leading up the valley side, noisy with hooves and straining wheels. But where the south shore angled out towards the sea, under the windows of the house at Pendurra, the comings and goings always stopped short. Yellow-flowering gorse and stunted blackthorn covered the higher land, impassable. Where the valley folded the lower slopes away from the salt wind, the greenwood grew dark and thick.

 
The family divided, married, spread, dwindled, left, returned, until the now antiquated house that faced out towards the sea was separated from the rest of their possessions and left to one of their remotest and humblest branches, along with the wild corner of land it overlooked, while the life and vigour of the estate moved to the finer mansion upriver. A civil war convulsed the country, the county and the family, the old connections were entirely severed at last, and the house and its woods were all but forgotten.

 
The kingdom grew rich. The whole continent grew rich. Its currencies were the laws of matter and motion and circulation. It was an empire of things. Manufacture made them; commerce exchanged them. Theories were written to govern their movements, from the greatest of them to the smallest, planets to pennies. When those laws reached their limits, telescopes and microscopes discovered still greater and still smaller things. But no one ever found the box with its silver clasp, carried by the currents until it lay wedged in a drowned fissure of rock beneath the low cliffs at the mouth of the river, holding inside it the forgotten magic of ages now condemned as barbarous, superstitious and fearful.

 
The magic, however, could not entirely forget itself. The powers that the drowned magus had commanded, and that thousands and thousands of far lesser charmers and blessers and shamans had dimly invoked, could not simply die. Their shadows haunted the place where the ring lay. They were drawn around its tomb like mourners, or pilgrims, or simply (since neither grief nor reverence had any meaning for them) like iron shavings to a magnet. The water that trickled from the spring in the Pendurra woods was the only fresh water in the whole empire of reason and commerce that was not just water, but something else too, something Johann Faust would have understood as the meaning or the virtue of a spring: something cleansing and life-giving. The house that stood there was not just an artefact of materials pinned and mortared together, but something else too: a haven, a mark of dwelling and permanence.

 
Anything that grew on this unvisited and backward slope of land grew among the echo of magic and might be touched by it; anything that left the place lost it. The house was empty sometimes and changed hands more than once. Living in the half-presence of these old, abandoned influences was by no means a blessing, and the older they became, the harder it was. What had first been mystery became superstition, then silliness and then something literally unthinkable and impossible. Nevertheless the house at Pendurra never decayed, the spring never failed, the orchard planted in the lee of the woods flourished even when it was untended, the beds of oysters spread where the river met the sea, the crows and gulls never robbed seed from the long field that was cleared on the higher slope.

 
The place sustained itself, but, by the same token, it kept itself apart. Because it needed nothing from outside its gates, it had almost as little to do with the wide world beyond as did the prophetess’s ring in its long concealment. The swifter the world became, the more Pendurra lagged behind. The mines that burrowed all over this furthest corner of England never touched the rocks on which the house stood. Less than a mile from its door, bulky wharves received taller and faster ships, and they floated downriver with their cargoes of tin or gravel or slate right under the shores where, according to legends that no one now read, the Magdalene had walked, but they had no reason to stop. Inland, beam engines rocked on every hilltop. Water and fire made steam, and steam drove Europe faster. Whole nations hitched themselves to its power and rode it forward, into the age of speed. But the faint powers that shrouded Pendurra were embedded in rhythms that could not hasten or change, the rhythm of what came to be called ‘nature’ because it was no longer the same as the world. It was where no one lived. It was an imaginary country.

 
Nothing rapid, nothing accelerated, could take hold at Pendurra for long. No one bothered any more to try and change the house and keep it up to date. It was like ‘nature’: you recognised it by its retrograde, nostalgic changelessness. Sons and daughters of the estate saw how the engines pumped wealth and brilliance into the hands of those who drove them, and left to join the rush, leaving the house and its lands in the care of whoever was willing to live in the modest lodge they erected for the purpose at the gates. Increasingly often, the whitewashed or wood-panelled rooms of the old house were empty. But even if an owner returned after years, or decades, there were no beetles in the wood, no cracks in the glass, no bats in the chimneys or moths in the tapestries. The caretakers smiled and took the credit and waited patiently for the sons and daughters to leave again, as they always did before long.

 
Except for Rufus Uren.

 
Rufus was born half the world away, third son of a tea planter in the Himalayan foothills. He grew up with only the vaguest notion that his mother was heir to some minuscule unprofitable backwater of an estate in some odd corner of the old country he had never seen but mysteriously owed his loyalty to. Other people dealt with that sort of thing, deferential businesslike employees whose whole reason for existence was to keep complicated distractions out of sight. If there was no money to be made from it, best to turn it over to those people and forget it. Or sell it, someone once suggested: but there was some difficulty, apparently, something about the house being unmodernised and inconvenient. And besides, it was a piece of Mother England they could call their own, which was a fine thing, surely?