CHAPTER 2
By the customs house was a stable. The stable master had gone home, but there was an honesty box.
Avelyn had to stand under the lamp looking down at his handful of crystal Hreod coins for an embarrassing few seconds before he had any sense of the value.
Six pence in a shilling, twelve shillings was a crown, six crowns was a guinea—had he used to earn a guinea a month in the mine?
What was reasonable for a borrowed horse?
He peered into the box to see what other people had left.
It was mainly the little amethyst tokens that were pence. Right.
On the back of the coin, the antler-crowned image of the Salt King flashed as it fell. It landed, as all the coins had, with the King facing upwards.
He went out to the paddock to see if he could entice anybody over with an apple, boots creaking on the stiff marsh grass that liked the briny earth here.
All the horses were clustered at the far end: they were licking a standing stone of red halite as though they were hoping to tidy it up for an important occasion.
It was the salt shape from the video.
The footage had made it look like a lump of rock, but if you were walking, catching the light on it at different angles, you could see that it had once been a person. The lines of elbows and shoulders were still there, and a dip that was the inward curve of a spine.
Something else hadn’t shown up on the camera either.
Avelyn knew what was coming, and he thought he was ready for it—he had even given himself a talking-to on the train about it—but when his sight adjusted, it was still a deep-down shock.
The halite glowed. It was not light that any film footage had ever recorded.
Avelyn didn’t know what salt light was. He’d never thought twice about it when he lived here.
When he left, he had wondered for a while if Hreoda saw slightly further up the spectrum and he’d been seeing ultraviolet light, but that didn’t explain why he stopped seeing it when he left.
He had tried to research it, but because Outsiders couldn’t see it, the few scholars who had braved Hreodwater seemed to think it was just a metaphor.
But he was actually seeing.
Threaded through the red stone was light. That light floated outward in an uneven halo, tinting the air for ten or twelve feet in every direction. It had its own colour, one Avelyn hadn’t seen for twelve years: an eerie amber-violet. Wisps of it hung in the air.
The closer to the mine you went, the brighter it would be.
The horses were happy. They loved rock salt almost as much as sugar. If there was nothing else, they’d nibble the salt that formed on the fence, but the discerning horse would always go for halite.
Avelyn eased between the horses and chipped some salt from the pillar with the corner of his phone. Each ruby shard smouldered, ember-glowing, as it fell into his palm.
Then he jumped, because the salt was hot. Not just warm because a horse had leaned against it, but—hot, like it had just come out of an oven.
What?
He had a maddening need to try and take a photo. His phone would still work for a couple of minutes this close to the border, but it wouldn’t pick up salt light, which was enraging because . . . how was he supposed to explain this to the Vatican?
A horse harrumphed and nudged him.
When he gave her an apple, she huffed approvingly and let him loop a bridle over her nose so they could go inside. The smell of hay and horses picked him up and dropped him twelve years into the past, and he was sixteen again.
Rome was a dream. He wasn’t a priest. That was silly. He was the grandson of Lady Brocken, and betrothed to Lady Hringen. He was the apprentice of a well-regarded witch and only a walk in the deep tunnels away from earning his mask.
He had to stand there and gather up the years again.
He wasn’t sixteen: he had taken his vows, he had held two ministries, he had a master’s degree in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, he lived at the Jesuit Curia along with everyone else who worked for Radio Vaticano, where he looked after the pointless Latin section of the news service two days a week, and for the other three .
. . he still had a year left teaching Latin to demonic teenagers at an inner-city secondary school before his training was finally done. 2
The horse put her nose on his shoulder to remind him that she would be requiring more apples if he was going to hang around irritatingly.
Lifting down a saddle from the hooks, he was surprised at the weight of the tack. You forgot things like that if your normal commute involved a motorbike in Rome.
He had a strange rush of peace. Rome was good, and motorbikes were good, and honestly, so were taxis that could meet you by the station and wouldn’t kick you into a hedge if you startled them.
But it was nice to do things properly again.
Life in a city was tiring without being effortful; Hreodwater was effortful without being tiring.
He noticed suddenly he was doing it all without any normal light. The salt light was bright enough. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it like this before so far from the mine. It was as clear as moonlight, glowing from the salt on the ground and in a fine haze in the air.
He frowned into it, hating it.
Seeing differently meant thinking differently, and if a place could change your eyes, then it would change your mind soon after.
Not much further on, drawn straight across the path, there was a clear line. On Avelyn’s side, there was salt glittering in the gravel, and thick mud. On the other side, as if it were just beyond the invisible wall of a snow globe, there was a blizzard.
The snow was falling in incredible loops, the flakes magnificent and inches thick on the ground.
Avelyn nearly laughed, because he had forgotten just how extreme the weird microclimates here could be.
The horse snorted as snow fell onto her nose, but she was used to it and plodded on without any pause, leaving heavy shoe prints behind.
Despite everything, Avelyn cheered up. He had a theory that your reaction to snow was a perfect measure of your mental health.
If you looked outside and saw snow and thought, Yay, snowman time!
then you were all right. If you thought, Ugh, what a pain in the arse, then probably you needed some antidepressants.
The Jesuit motto was that God was in all things, and although Avelyn struggled with that, he was solid about God being in the snow.
Snow at Yule, whispered Hreodwater Avelyn from by his fire in the rubble, is not our snow.
“Shut up,” Avelyn said aloud.
To either side of the road was nothing but the reed-waving fen.
Ahead, as always once you were close, fog.
Then salt water washed across the road, the salt light in it just enough for him to see the silhouettes of the eels.
No boat waited, so he took out the matches he’d only just remembered to bring, slipped down from the horse, and climbed the ladder up to the stone beacon.
He balanced on the second-to-last rung to hunch over the kindling.
Expecting that it would be a little while, he settled down on the wharf with his flask of coffee and apple number three, and handed apple number four to the horse.
They weren’t good apples, but for a long time now, he hadn’t been able to taste much.
He had noticed it when he first arrived in Rome and thought he’d just got some kind of quiet cold, but it had never gone away.
The horse made an interrogatory sound at him and looked at the ground, which was moving.
He stood up fast, because it wasn’t the ground moving.
It was rats. Hundreds of rats: they were swimming out of the water, scrambling ashore, and darting away onto the fen as though there was a fire behind them.
There was nothing behind them, though. Only a flare of salt light in the fog, brighter than he’d ever seen it, from the minehead.
The ferryman had been the same person since Avelyn could remember.
She was called Redspear—Avelyn had never been sure if that was a first or last name—and when she wasn’t steering the ferry, she was a farmer, which was why there were always seven or eight interested pigs aboard.
Redspear believed in making sure they got in a good evening constitutional.
As Avelyn tied the horse’s bridle to the rail, they all came to say hello.
For her part, the horse seemed not to mind the ferry, although that might have been because she was distracted by a piglet, who had sat down next to her, clearly trying to work out what sort of pig she was.
“That’s never Avelyn Brocken come home again,” Redspear said suddenly in Hreod.
Avelyn hadn’t heard a word of Hreod since he’d left. It was a language from another life. “It is, grandmother.”
It was coming back as easily as slipping down a muddy hill.
Redspear broke into a slow grin. “I thought the King would wake sooner.”
She did not mean the King of England.
“Same,” Avelyn admitted, watching the water and trying desperately to broadcast preoccupation so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore.
The water was so salty that nothing grew in it.
It was quartz-clear all the way down. That was about twenty feet at this time of year.
Down there were the offerings of millennia sinking into the silt.
By the motes of salt light dissolved into the water, he could see it all glinting.
Coins, knives, sometimes armour—and once, a crown.
“What’s it like in the Outside?” Redspear asked.
Avelyn thought about it, not with his normal thinking, which Redspear would find at best irrelevant and at worst insane, but his Hreod thinking.
He had hoped it was dead and cremated long ago, but no: there it was, waking with the deepening cold and the brightening salt, just like his eyes.
“There’s nothing there,” he said at last.
Redspear looked satisfied. “Thought so.”
And there was Hreodwater. At first, it was a collection of sharp, tall angles in the fog: a rock that stood in the Flood, even though there was never rocky ground in the fens.
It was because it wasn’t real rock. It was halite, hard as granite, never dissolving despite the water and the vaporous air.
The houses were high and narrow, following the rock up right to the top, their lights so much dimmer than anything in the Outside.
They glittered in the salt-rimed thatch and above the uneven doors, along the slim flights of steps that led up and up, and around the spiral of the single road.
He had a terrible swell of homecoming.
If, after years wandering, Eve’s lodestone had lost its magnetism and the stars had tricked her back the way she had come, and she found herself standing outside the gate of Eden, the masonry tumbled by bad weather so she could see inside to the spices and the flowers, up to the great tree on its hill where the snake had said, It’s better to know than not know: he thought maybe he understood how she’d feel.
The boat bumped the jetty. Avelyn climbed out, his hands shaking as he lifted his bag and paid Redspear. He was not afraid of this place, but he was afraid of who he was when he was here. Rome Avelyn seemed solid in Rome. But here, in the salt . . .
“Know where you’re going?” Redspear asked him, taking the horse’s bridle. There was a stable on the dock.
Avelyn pointed to the next island on, only just sketched out in the mist, where a strangely proportioned tower loomed.
“North to An El,” he said. Hreod required you to know the compass directions of any place you mentioned, and even any object you wanted to emphasise.
You couldn’t say, Pass me that thing on your left.
That was nonsense in Hreod. You had to say, That thing in the northwest. He had no idea why.
There was only one other language in the world that did it, somewhere in Australia, and they didn’t know why either.
It always sounded as though everyone expected everything, even buildings, not to be where you’d left them.
At the mention of the abbey, Redspear’s cheer dulled, and she made the antler sign of the Salt King.
2 Jesuit training took ten years. It was ominously called formation, as if a finished Jesuit was a geological phenomenon built from terrifying pressures.
You studied philosophy, then you did a pilgrimage in poverty, then you were posted to a ministry somewhere so desperate that they could forgive you for being a Jesuit, then there was more study, more ministry, and then finally, as the capstone to it all, you taught at a secondary school, because once you’d done that, you’d be grateful to be posted to a war zone.