CHAPTER 30
The daylight was a shock. The sky was silver, and right across the fen, the clouds hung low, blending with the fog into one great haze.
Silent whorls of snow looped in the still air.
Although it could only have been just past two o’clock, the gloom was twilightish.
The fires were still burning on the green, tinting the white ground merry gold, throwing the shadows around.
The dancers were still dancing, but with the children this time, and even some of the clergy from An El.
Someone with stag antlers was whirling a laughing nun around, her veil floating behind her, along with the first wisps of the Blessing.
It was so good to get away from the salt air in the mine.
Out here, there was still a tang if you knew to think after it, but mainly it was hot wine and the lovely green smell of new-cut holly and ivy for the wreaths.
All the stalls were selling them, as well as little dolls of Saint Hildegard, ornaments and jewellery made from cheap salt that looked like diamonds, scarves woven with silver thread, tiny stained windows painted just like the great window down at An El, hot pistachios and pecans and salt cakes.
Caramelised sugar tided in the air, and for a mad second, it was hard to remember that anything was wrong.
“Can somebody please tell me what in God’s name is going on?” Avelyn asked.
“Yes,” said Ras. “But let’s get you some wine first, you—need to sit down.”
He wanted to say that he did not need to sit down, thank you, he just needed to understand, but Ras was right.
Everything seemed too vivid, his thinking had gone giddy and disjointed, and when Jericho pressed his shoulder to guide him onto a bench at a free table, he was glad of it.
He watched Ras flit to a wine stall—the one run by the annoying lady he had cursed earlier—and then looked down when Redspear handed him a fox cub.
The cub was a heavy ball of white fluff, and when Ras came back with the wine, it wanted to know what wine was like, then sneezed disgustedly when Avelyn gave it some. He felt a bit better.
Ras set Jericho’s cup down with an anxious look at Redspear, as though he thought he might be doing something wrong. Redspear ignored it, and when Jericho said thank you, Ras looked fixedly at the ground.
Avelyn took the photographs out of his pocket and laid them out on the table. The edges were salt-crumbled, but the images were all right. The forest. The huge, impossible stag thing. And then last . . .
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t shown us that,” Redspear said heavily.
Ras had gone a horrible colour. Avelyn had never seen that happen to anyone in real life before.
Jericho had one fist resting against his mouth, composed and unsurprised.
It wasn’t a good photograph. Avelyn had held the camera out blind.
What it showed was blurred, but it did show something.
Something like—a bird. A very tall bird, but unsettlingly nearer to human than anything avian.
Its face was some catch between a person and one of those owls that hunted in the deserts around Syria, the ones that were called lilliths in old stories, and which were supposed to be evil spirits who stole children, with black hollows for eyes, and cruel beaks.
“It was there,” he said, somewhere on the road between indignant and horrified. He looked at Jericho. “It was there, you must have seen it, but you told me—”
“I lied to you,” Jericho said.
“What?” Avelyn managed.
The other two sat back and exchanged a glance. Redspear shrugged a little. You first. Ras took a deep breath.
“This isn’t real,” he said carefully, about the photograph.
He didn’t quite touch it, just skimming his fingertips a fraction of an inch above the surface of the plastic.
The others were looking uneasy about it too.
“This is the dream of a thing—the King’s dream, you understand?
” His eyes begged Avelyn to understand. “But your seeing it . . . would have made it real. It could have hurt you.”
“You can see them and not make them true,” Redspear said, taking over just as carefully.
They might have been passing a brimming cup between each other.
“If we were to send a mad person down there, who knows they’re mad and sees untrue things all the time—the dreams would stay dreams. But for most of us, seeing is believing, and believing is true. ”
She picked up a handful of salt and threw it just a couple of inches, so it landed back in her palm again.
It made the image of a stag. “To cast the salt well is to believe nothing.” She did it again, and this time there was no stag, no image at all.
“Which is how you must be, in the deep.” There was a tight little silence.
“That’s why they won’t let you go down unless you can do it. ”
Avelyn had to look away, because his memory flared that terrible image of his grandmother again, swinging the sledgehammer, in that last instant before she smashed the support pillar to matchsticks. The fox cub nosed at his hand, plainly hoping that the wine would taste better on a second go.
“You said you lied to me,” he said to Jericho, praying for English and an explanation that made sense.
“I made you believe it wasn’t there,” Jericho said heavily, “and so it wasn’t.”
“But you must have seen it, what about what you believe—”
“He isn’t really here either,” Redspear said.
Avelyn had to ignore her.
Even Jericho shot her a sideways glance that said she wasn’t helping.
“I believed it would go away if I made you believe that too. It’s how I treated your leg.
I told you it didn’t hurt, and I said it would get better quickly, and you believed me.
It’s why the cures are happening: people believe they will recover, and so they do.
That’s what salt light does. It converts belief . . . into matter.”
Avelyn had to sit and let it settle over him. The snow was doing that too, dusting all their sleeves, hissing when it fell into the hot wine. The fox cub manoeuvred down the front of his shirt and sat there looking pleased with itself. He stroked it, glad to have something warm and alive to hold.
“You do know this,” Redspear pushed, very gentle. “You know why there are sledgehammers on the support pillars in the deep. Remember?”
He could hear that roar of collapsing masonry again.
He had said to Father Li, “It was my fault,” and Li had said, “Don’t be ridiculous; your grandmother believed something wrong.
Maybe she thought terrible things would happen if she didn’t collapse the shaft, but they wouldn’t have.
There’s nothing down there. Just superstition, and God, because God is in all things, and you know what? There is nothing God can’t forgive.”
Fairy tales. Beautiful, hypnotising Roman fairy tales.
Down in the deep, from behind a witch’s mask and beside his fire, Hreodwater Avelyn gave him a long, sympathetic look, and fed a few more wooden crosses into the flames. The little bronze Christs were falling orphaned and blackened into the heart of the embers once the wood burned away.
“You knew,” he said to Jericho. “You knew the cures were happening because the salt light was bright. And you knew,” he aimed at Redspear and Ras, “that Matthew died because of overexposure, because of—salt tarnishing. Jesus Christ, why didn’t you say that to me?
And why haven’t you evacuated all the Outsiders?
” His voice broke over it. “People are going to die! For God’s sake, Annunciata is . . .”
She was dancing too. One of the black-and-feather-clad figures lifted her right up, and her distinctive laugh cut right around the green. Even with the firelight behind her, her halo blazed.
“I know,” Jericho said, “I know, but it isn’t—”
“I know no one can leave now with Caer Halen on the fen or whatever the fuck it is, but you had two weeks to move people before—”
Jericho was making No, no gestures with both hands, and both Ras and Redspear tried to talk at the same time, but they didn’t get far because they were interrupted by somebody else.
“Um, pardon me?”
It was the wine seller, the one who had been rude to Jericho before.
“Brother?” she said to Avelyn. She looked more worried and less angry than before. “Can you lift the curse now, please? I’ll sacrifice to your god.”
Avelyn reflected a little bit madly that if he had to speak Hreod or interact with Hreod Thinking ever again, it was going to be a thousand years too soon. “No.”
“No, but you have to!”
“Avelyn,” Jericho said, and of course, of course Jericho would forgive her, but then, Jericho would forgive someone who had introduced him to a set of thumbscrews. He would fret about their horrid childhood and that they hadn’t had any proper economic opportunities, except the thumbscrewing.
Well, fuck that.
Avelyn looked past the vintner’s shoulder again, higher, and higher, and pretended to see something there, leaning over her.
The vintner swung around, and let out a strangled noise.
Ras put his hand over his face. “We just told you . . .”
There was something behind her. It was outlined in salt light, a dark void in the bright particles—they veered away from the shape just like they hurried away from Jericho and from the stag in the mine, but this time, there was nothing solid for them to avoid, just a shadow.
It was huge, and as they both stared at it, it leaned down over her.
She yelled and ran. Ran, like you never saw adults run, and whatever the thing in the light was, it tore after her at a hyena lope Avelyn couldn’t perfectly follow, because it was still just a void in the salt glow, a clear shadow in the patches where there was plenty of light, the barest ghost where it faded.