Advent (73 page)

 
There was a hum in the water.

 
It was a deep, wonderful sound, a homecoming sound. It rushed towards him, joyfully swift. His consciousness of things fading, beaten down and completely spent at long last, Gawain ceased his struggle and let it come for him. He sank slowly as it swelled closer. For a strangely blissful moment it drowned out the agony in his back and the crushing weight on his lungs, and he knew it; he remembered its hymn of blood and sustenance, the song of the untrammelled ocean. He remembered its name:
ma’chinu’ch
,
ma’chinu’ch
. He opened his throat to welcome it. In the darkness of the water he saw the singer, a huge slick blackness surging towards him as if the sea itself had taken flesh.

 
A great welling current in the river came ahead of it like a second tide. It thrust him up. Noise and chaos returned in a rush as his head came out. There was Corbo, wheeling high above, cawing its grim cry. He’d surfaced far out from the shore and the winged beast had lost track of him for the moment. Through the sting of salt and the sparks of pain in his eyes he saw the warlock still perched at the extremity of her low spur of rock, bending forward, scanning the river.

 
‘There!’ she shouted. ‘There!’ She stretched out her staff towards him. ‘Finish him!’ Corbo was already pitching down, a black bolt from the sullen clouds.

 
The surface of the river trembled, then roiled, and then light and darkness breached it and surged up, massive and swift and irresistible.

 
Corbo screeched, but now it was shouting the name of the thing that had leaped from the water: ‘
Orca! Orca
!
’ A whale, black-backed and white-bellied, a slick titanic bullet cannoned from the river, so swift that Gawain only saw it for the second of its deadly arc through the air. But that second was long enough for it to sweep alongside the isthmus of rock where the warlock stood. The glancing blow of its fin tossed her up like winnowed chaff.

 
Talons rushed at Gawain’s face. He lifted his arms weakly and sank straight back down to the silence below. He didn’t see his aunt’s body crash into the water, limp as a sack, or the warlock’s staff bobbing away, already in the grip of the seaward tide. He didn’t see Corbo’s wings snap stiff, carrying the suddenly quiet crow-beast away in a long glide. All he saw was the featureless dark expanse stretching away from him, and himself fading into it, ebbing, vanishing oceanwards.

 
He sank slowly, his last strength gone.

 
Then he was rising again. He felt himself lifted, but was past knowing or caring how, though there might have been white arms. He was flotsam.

 
He came to the surface. The sky was barren and peaceful as the depths. Water dribbled from his nose and mouth.

 
Something washed him up on the coarse sand. He lay there, belly down, up to his chest in the icy river, a piece of sodden driftwood. Fragments of shells pricked his cheek. He tasted blood and seawater.

 
Slow feet scrunched down the beach. Wheezing breath accompanied them. Gawain didn’t think to try and move his head to see who it was. He felt peacefully insensible, like a stone.

 
‘Oh my love,’ said the voice that went with the wheezing and the footsteps. ‘Oh God. Oh my dear love.’

 
From somewhere beyond his feet another voice whispered very softly ‘Fetch him water.’

 
This struck Gawain as a wonderful idea. He noticed how unbearably thirsty he was. The salt in his mouth made it feel like it was being scoured and baked.

 
‘From the well.’ If everything else hadn’t been so quiet all of a sudden, he doubted he’d have heard the rippling whisper. No one moved.

 
‘Marina,’ said the same voice.

 
More scrunching, and he heard Marina now, sounding very trembly and very young.

 
‘Where’s . . . What happened to—’

 
‘The warlock is broken. You’re safe now. The well, quickly, or the boy will die.’

 
‘Yes, sorry. Sorry.’ Poor Marina, Gawain thought distantly. Always does as she’s told. ‘I’ll go.’ Her steps started away hesitantly at first, then sped into a run and were silenced as she clambered up to snow-covered ground.

 
He hoped she’d hurry. Dying didn’t seem too bad now that he was three-quarters of the way there already, but he was really desperate for that drink.

 
The voice beyond his feet whispered something so quietly that only a ghost like him could have heard it.

 
‘Go safely. My heart. My second heart. Be always safe.’

 
Shoes appeared in his line of sight. Wet brown shoes, with wet brown trouser cuffs above them. He would have had to turn his neck to see more, and he had the vague feeling that any attempt to move would start a volcanic eruption of pain in his back, but he didn’t need to bother, since he’d figured out that this was Tristram Uren. Something about the shoes. Funny the things you notice, he thought.

 
‘Swanny. Oh God, Swanny. Oh thank God. Thank God.’

 
Now he couldn’t hear what she said. It was obscured by the sound of Tristram’s feet shuffling into the water, and his hoarse gasp at the cold.

 
‘I can’t let you go again,’ he said. ‘Not again. Oh, Swanny. This has to be the end.’

 
He must have stopped splashing around, because this time he heard her. ‘Then come to me. Quickly, before she returns.’

 
The steps struggled further into the water, halted.

 
‘How can we leave her? Oh my love, my love!’ Between joy and grief his voice cracked apart.

 
‘I watched her for these many years. I will watch her still. And the boy is kind, and brave.’

 
I wonder what boy she’s talking about, Gawain thought.

 
‘Eleven years.’ Tristram’s whisper was almost as soft as the mermaid’s. ‘There hasn’t been a single minute when I didn’t think of you. Not one.’ His voice rose. ‘Not one. Swanny, Swanny! God forgive me, this is all I ever wanted. To be yours again. To die happy.’

 
Dictionary definition
, another ghost said in Gawain’s head, hazily.
A state of rapture, supposedly inspired in men by nymphs. Hence, a frenzy of emotion inspired by something unattainable
. He remembered stories. Odysseus and the sirens. When sailors saw mermaids they’d throw themselves into the sea and drown.

 
‘I’m here,’ Swanny said. ‘Come now. If our child sees you go, her heart will break.’

 
Gawain felt something trickle along his nose. It was a tear. He hoped it would drip into his mouth.

 
‘Tell her—’ Tristram began, and his heavy breath choked. ‘Tell her—’ he tried again. He made a small noise that might have been clearing his throat.

 
‘Tell her . . . she has been the light in my life all these years. Tell her I couldn’t have borne losing her mother again. No more than she could have borne it herself. Tell her I love her more than . . . more than . . .’

 
The mermaid’s whisper broke the silence, remote as a wisp of mountain cloud. ‘Come and love me.’

 
The shoes and trousers went further into the river and out of Gawain’s sight. He had gone back to contemplating the bleached shards of shell in front of his eyes when it slowly occurred to him that Tristram’s last words had probably been addressed to him. Wait a minute, he thought. Tell her what? Tell who? Why?

 
There was some agitation about the question that broke through his dullness. It suddenly seemed important to see what was going on. With enormous effort, he inched his chin a little closer to his shoulder, angling his head just enough to look down past his own slumped body and out into the river. It took nearly as much effort to get his eyes to focus. There was an awful, throbbing pain. He’d somehow managed to avoid noticing it before, but now it interfered, making his eyes water and fill with shooting stars. He squinted through them.

 
The mermaid was waist deep in the river, arms out, a luminous smile on her glistening face. Tristram Uren, his hair white as winter, waded out towards her through the shallows. She seemed to glide back a little as he approached, and a little further again, until it looked as if he might stumble and sink before he reached her embrace. Then in one joyous movement she surged forward, clasping him, lifting both of them up. They held each other as tight as if they had grown together, she the white column and he the clinging vine, and it seemed to Gawain’s imperfect sight that they shone for a moment as they kissed, the sheen of water catching whatever final radiance the expiring day had to give them. Then they sank together and the river settled over them. After that there was nothing to see.

Part VII

Omens

Thirty-two

For the first
time the greatest magus in the world knew what it truly meant to face death.

 
Her ribs had cracked when the whale struck up at her, and all the breath had been driven from her body when she fell to the river, and her clothes, filled with freezing water, weighed on her like the chains of the condemned, but none of the agonies of the body even began to compare to the livid terror of knowing she would now die. She’d drowned once before, but now there was no enchanted microcosm of her soul given in immortal safekeeping, no assurance with which to defy the hideous indifference of the sea. This was the end, the unthinkable terminus.

 
And beyond the end, judgement waited.

 
No plumb could have sounded the depths of horror the magus knew in those few stretched seconds of her drowning as the prospect of a final reckoning opened before her. Johann Faust had thought himself one of the holiest of men. He had been the devoted and selfless servant of wisdom, that most precious of virtues. He had reverenced the fingerprints left by the Maker’s hand. Even when he was wrecked with the English mariners in the guise of Master John Fiste, and sunk to his first death, the horrible animal fear and solitude of drowning had been warmed by a comforting conscience; for although he had already then dreamed of stealing immortality for himself, he had – the certainty of it was bedrock under the tossing storm – done no harm. Had that been the day of his true death, he would have gone down among the cursing sailors like a prince among peasants, calmly enduring the brutality of the waves for what it was, a mere instant of suffering before an endless journey into glory.

 
But now – she could not deny it to herself, even in her most desperate need – she had descended to cruelty.

 
Unforgivable cruelty. The dryad locked for ever in its tomb of wood, the screaming boy bleeding in the water, the half-girl watching her own mother die. And – this was the sight that overwhelmed her mind’s eye, in those few seconds of wasted struggle – the beggar prophetess, the princess of Troy, the bearer of the gift of magic itself, lying with her neck broken like scythed stubble. She, the deepest marvel of the world; she, who had waited twice a thousand years for his love; she, flushed out and killed like a barn rat, and left unmourned in the snow.

 
The magus knew, with the iron certainty that arrives as the ingenious subtleties of self-deception finally expire, that she was damned.

 
Damned.

 
And to compound the awful, absolute horror of this certainty, she knew – as surely no other mortal ever had, not the penitents nor the church doctors nor the raving visionaries – what damnation might mean. She knew some fraction of it: a drop from the unquenchable Phlegethon had already fallen in her cup. For the blank-eyed servant whose obedience she had won so long ago, the fiery phantom whom she had made her messenger and viceroy in the realms of spirit, was a being of the lower spheres. Not a demon, no. Not that. She could no more command demons than angels. But (how could she have denied it to herself all those years? How could she have been so seduced by its willingness to serve that she had never once asked herself what it truly was she had admitted to her company?) it was the most despised companion of demons, denizen of the outermost suburbs of Pandemonium. It ranked among the worms and the mayflies of hell.