One bus, and another, and one more; and then a walk in welcome sunshine, following tourist signs to Hawker’s Hole.
I wasn’t the only one. There were holidaying families and couples in clinches, solitary hikers and teenagers in gangs, all mooching in a slow parade through village streets and then up a country lane. Here was a pub – of course! – with a car park. Through the car park, and here was a path across a field full of cows, and a stile with a booth beyond. In the booth was a woman selling tickets, two pounds a time and kids half price. The teenagers weren’t buying, not at any price; perhaps they’d try to sneak in another way, but I thought most likely they’d head back to the pub to try their chances, as soon as they thought their relevant grown-ups weren’t watching.
Good luck with that
, I thought, quite genuinely. Been there, done that. Adolescence is all about change, transition, trying to release your inner butterfly; alcohol is the magic potion that can make it happen sooner, brighter. Every kid knows that.
They couldn’t all find themselves gifted with an Aspect, but they could all imagine it, work for it. Drink for it.
Talking of which: I paid my two pounds, trudged up the path, reached for my Aspect as I went.
Was glad to feel it settle across my shoulders, safe and reliable and there at my beck and call, not a hint of reluctance or over-reaction or independence of mind. Of course not, it didn’t have a mind. But I’d almost grown used to having it bolshie or enthusiastic or absent, adolescent, unpredictable, the worst thing in a weapon. It was nothing but relief to face none of that, now of all times, coming home.
Its home, that is. In so far as a gift, a talent, a strength can have a home. A point of origin, at least. A source. I was bringing it back to the source.
With, um. Very different intentions than when we left.
Up the path, and here was the dark mouth of the cave, Hawker’s Hole its own self; and here was its guardian, and here were all the people who had come up before me, gathered about. Emphatically not going in. It really isn’t that kind of cave.
Wikipedia lists it as a petrifying well. Which is oddly appropriate, if only they knew. Perhaps they did; perhaps someone’s being clever. Someone who knows Oz Trumby all too well.
Anyway. All along the upper lip of the cavemouth, there’s a constant drip of water. If you want to step through into the cave proper, it’s like walking through a cold brief shower. Only you have to duck, because there’s a rope hung just below that lip, and all along the rope...
Well. There’s a guardian, a man who’s always there; he might be husband to the woman in the booth. She takes your money, he takes your precious things. Your toys, your teddy bears. Your baby’s bootees. Your wedding veil. Anything that will soak up moisture. Love letters in a packet tied with ribbon. The hair you cut off in a plait when you were twenty-one.
He takes them and he hangs them from the rope, on their own individual string. Soon enough, they’re sodden; but by that time you’ve gone, because what’s the point of hanging around, what’s the attraction? There’s nothing to see here but dripping things.
Except that perhaps you come back in a year, a few years; and perhaps your offering is still up there, still petrifying. Hardening, whitening, turning to slow stone on its stiffening string.
If it’s gone all the way, then it’s gone. Once they’re done, he takes them down to make room for the next. I don’t know what he does with the stony things. Maybe he just collects them, in some hidden storage-cave. Maybe he gives them away, maybe he sells them far from here. Maybe he eats them, maybe he’s a lithophage. Who can say?
I wasn’t there to stand with the tourists paying homage, or the bored and scornful adolescents, or the tearful children realising what they’d lost. I wasn’t there to make a sacrifice on any dripping altar, either. Unless I sacrificed myself. I might do that.
I might be mad, to come here.
Still. Here I was, all unannounced and hopefully unexpected. When you send people to fetch someone, and they don’t come – well. You send again, maybe, and more persuasively, but you don’t expect your quarry to turn up anyway, dangerously, independently. You don’t expect your quarry to come hunting you.
When you think they’re driving down to the other end of the country, you really don’t.
Shouldn’t.
I hoped.
T
HE PATH GOES
on, past the dripping cavemouth and the busy little man. Sometimes kids run up that way, but they usually stop at the hedge, whether or not they can read the sign that says
Private – No Public Right of Way.
The sign hangs on a gate of solid wood, like a door in a frame in the living hedge. It’s all very Narnia. There’s even a doorknob, and a keyhole.
If anyone had the key, that would be Oz; but one thing for sure, Oz wasn’t trekking up and down to open it. Nor sending a minion. He liked his minions to come and go, any hour, day or night. The gate is never locked.
Turn the knob, open the gate, step through.
From the outside, the public side of this high hedge, it looks as though what it hedges against, what it’s holding back, is open moor. That isn’t true, exactly. There is a rising slope of bare rough ground, but this whole hillside is actually enclosed; where there isn’t a hedge of maximum spiny unfriendliness, there’s an impassable ditch. Unless you can fly, this gate is the only way through, or at least the only wise way. Even if you don’t know what lurks in Oz’s hedgerows and ditchways – does the phrase “were-leech” mean nothing to you? – the wisdom is easy to see.
It is possible to be both wise and foolish, both at once. Actually, it’s commonplace.
I, even I, with my Aspect on and everything, I didn’t try to leap a ditch or force my way through any hedge.
I, even I, knowing exactly what I knew about Oz and his cohorts, even knowing the absolute certainty that someone would be on watch, even if they weren’t expecting me?
I opened the gate, and stepped through.
I
WAS RIGHT
, they weren’t expecting me. If they were, there’d have been a bigger welcoming committee, more alert.
One bored wolf? Not a problem.
I’ve always fancied a wolfskin rug. Something to shock my vegetarian friends. Maybe I’d pick it up on the way out. Hell, if she hadn’t wanted to contribute to my decor, she shouldn’t have died in costume.
Sometimes, I was sure my Aspect got into my thinking. Fay had never been that coldly ruthless. Hell, Fay had been halfway vegetarian herself. Desi thought salads were animal fodder. And then she wanted to eat the animal.
Even Desi left the wolf for later, though: hung on that thorny hedge to bleed out.
The hillside rose surprisingly sharply, this side of the hedge. You couldn’t see from the other side, but the hedge was planted right at its foot, just where a map-maker would have painted a contour line if they were working in 1:1 scale, direct equivalence, charting the actual landscape.
There was a well-trodden path from the gate around that rise, to where the same hands had set another solid wooden frame.
This time, the frame was in the face of the hill itself. Which somehow made all the difference, because you really couldn’t call it a gate this time. That was a door. If it were only a round door, it would be a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. Tragically, it was stubbornly oblong, and that means... Well. Oz. Nothing to do with comfort.
It was an unguarded door now, or I hoped so. He might have some little scuttling thing watching it from inside the keyhole, but there was really nothing I could do about...
Okay. I did crouch down and peer through.
Only quickly, and there was nothing to see: just a lit tunnel, an emptiness, a come-this-way-if-you-dare.
I did dare. I had to. I was the day’s surprise.
Softly, then, and with my Aspect clamped about me like a second skin, I turned the handle on the hillside door, and pushed it slowly open.
Still nothing. The lights were foggy and romantic, storm-lanterns set in niches, wicks aflame in cautious chimneys, fire contained and safe. The tunnel was a passage sloping down, to the heart of the hill. Nothing moved, except the light and me.
I closed the door behind me, just in case. I’d have locked it, if I’d only had the key.
I
’D BEEN THIS
way before, but not alone and not trying to sneak. At every step I expected hidden doors to open, guards to step out. Fearsome guards, naturally. Or maybe they wouldn’t bother with doors, maybe they’d just manifest from the walls, rock and earth compounded together into invulnerable creatures of terrible strength. Or they’d just watch me, strange eyes of dust lurking deep in every fissure; or...
I didn’t skulk, then. It’s hard to sneak without skulking, but I walked steadily down the centre of the passage, absolutely as far as I could come from hugging the walls. I was afraid the walls might hug me back, hands suddenly reaching out to snatch at me. I’d hate that.
So, yeah. Straight down the middle, open and honest, an invasion of one. Just call me Luke. Jedi powers and all.
Well, some of them. Even if they were only borrowed. I snuggled closer into my Aspect, and wished I could have sent it in ahead. Or instead, that would’ve been good...
Here was the curve in the passage, I remembered this, and the steps that led down to Oz’s chamber. It was oddly quiet down there: no buzz of voices, so that I could hear the drip-drip of water quite distinctly. Hey, maybe he was sleeping? I remembered it as a bustle of activity, the heart of an empire, continuously beating; but I supposed he must have downtime, even he.
If he did, he was sleeping with the lights on – but only a few. There was a glow coming up, rather than a blaze. I remembered it as brighter than that.
Increasingly hopeful, then, I took those steps at a calm and steady pace. Down and around, and here was the chamber I remembered, a great vaulted cave where the walls ran with moisture and the stone shone in the light and the floor was always puddled like spilt milk.
And people had been coming and going before, splashing through the puddles, barefoot and reverent; but not now. Now only every other lamp was lit, and I hadn’t realised there was so much open floor, or so many blackly gaping mouths around the walls, unlit passageways that might be leading anywhere.
Actually, of course, they all led here. They might be coming from anywhere, deeper in the hill, but here was what mattered.
Here was Oz.
The floor was only smooth and roughly level around the edges of the chamber. Towards the centre, it started to rise: first in ripples, like sand after the tide has drawn back, broken up by rivulets of water and all those standing puddles. Then it was more like abandoned sandcastles, heaps and softly rounded mounds of solid stone, some with an occasional drip still falling from high above to show how they happened, how centuries of water laid them down and built them up.
They’re hard to notice, though, unless you’re looking down deliberately, trying to avoid the real feature of this place. I guess a lot of people would do that. People here not by choice, people who’ve been fetched in to face reprimand or cold stone fury. You’d watch your feet, and see all the shining detail of that textured floor, only because you didn’t dare raise your eyes to meet the master here.
Half of those rising mounds are dry now, because most of the falling water has been rechannelled. Workers must have clung to the ceiling, one way or another, high above that dreadful drop, constructing painstaking pipework, all so that Oz can have his steady unrelenting shower.
Those low rises are just outliers, hesitations before the main event, rocky reefs around a sudden island.
There’s an upthrust, an irregular promontory of stone; and at its height, where the constant deluge batters down, that’s where you look for Oz. Where people have looked year after year, for centuries.
Oz who was born human, and didn’t want to die.
Oz who had found his own strange path to immortality: a path you didn’t walk, a place to hunker down while time marched by and missed you.
No one knows quite how long Oz has been sitting there, in the keeping of his own petrifying well. Long enough that his skin has sealed itself into the walls of stone that have built up around him, so that only his head shows now, bald and sleek and running milky-wet. He sits a hard seat; he is his own throne.
What skin still shows is pallid past believing. Even the pupils of his eyes have bleached, a blue so washed-out they’re hard to distinguish from the ancient ivory of the whites around. His gaze is perhaps the least human thing about him, except for the wish that set him there and the will that kept him there, his determination to transform. Not to be human at all.
I guess he got his wish. Normal mortality has leached out of him like colour, as the minerals and salts and I don’t know what have leached in. The borders between magic and science, between the mortal world and the Overworld, are never clear; they’re smudged for all of us. For Oz Trumby, they’re positively smeared.
Those dreadful eyes of his were closed, and I thought that was a blessing. Short-lived, because I did need to wake him up, but a blessing nonetheless. It gave me time to draw a breath, to look around, to settle my nerves a little, be ready to play the cool collected daemon for all that I was worth.