Advent (40 page)

 
‘Johannes Faust!’ she cried. ‘Johannes Faust!’

 
Bloodless and bodiless as he was, the magus felt lightning pulse through him. A fury erupted in the room. The woman cringed against the floor, covering her head. A man seized her by the wrists and dragged her up on her feet, shouting. Another man, an old man in the front rank, spread his hands, gesturing for peace.

 
‘My name,’ the magus said hoarsely. ‘She knows me.’

 
‘Return now, Magister.’

 
‘Who is the one that knows me?’

 
‘Magister, do not delay.’

 
‘Answer me!’ The men were pulling her out of the room. He made to pursue and felt the spirit’s recalcitrance holding him back like a ghostly anchor.

 
‘Release me!’ She was already disappearing into the exterior shadows.

 
‘Heed us, Magister.’

 
‘You disobey? You have no freedom to do other than as I command you!’

 
The empty face bowed, the trace of a ghastly smile on its glimmering lips.

 
‘I must question her.’ The rite was reassembling. The family and their attendants returned their attention to the droning celebrant by the fire, the crude idol in the wall.

 
‘She is cursed, Magister.’

 
‘Who is she? By what name is she known?’

 
The voice lingered over the sibilance, as if the word were the hiss of a dying fire:

 
Cassandra
.

 
Its answer held the magus like a spell.

 
‘Did you not know her, Magister, as she knew you?’ Its voice writhed among the chanting. Lost in a rapture he had forgotten he could feel, stretched out on the first stirrings of a peculiar bittersweet longing, the magus heard it only as the sound of cloth sliding over a stone floor.

 
‘Cassandra,’ he echoed.

 
‘She who broke her pledge, who scorned her gift. Now it scorns her. She betrayed the bond between mortals and spirits, Magister. Now she carries the betrayal with her. Beware her.’

 
The last words broke through the magus’s fog of wonder. ‘What?’ He frowned. ‘What riddling is this?’

 
‘Her curse is called magic, Magister.’

 
The magus began to grow angry. She was gone who knew where. He was losing time.

 
‘I must speak with her. Show me where she is.’

 
‘I cannot.’

 
‘What? Do you dare offer disobedience?’

 
‘No disobedience. I am bound to ward you. Her curse is heavy.’

 
‘Curse?’ the magus scoffed. ‘Do you imagine I am ignorant of it? Is it not proverbial? A trick of speech, no more.’

 
‘You are ignorant,’ the spirit whispered, an answer that might have been calculated to enrage him.

 
‘You think I do not know what every pedant knows? Of course I know her legend.’ An argument between ghosts, chittering like mice in the roof. ‘To know the truth always, but never to be believed. Is it not so? She prophesied the fall of this city’ – he waved his spectral arm, gesturing contemptuously at the doomed family – ‘but they scorned her. You call that a curse? The truth is not a curse, Spirit. Not for such as I.’

 
‘Maybe, Magister.’

 
‘She called me by name!’ He gazed towards the dusty tiles where she had crouched. ‘She is a prophetess. I will speak with her. If you refuse to conduct me, then leave me.’

 
‘God-ridden,’ the shimmering face answered, leaning towards him. For a moment he seemed to hear burning in its speech, the sound of destruction. ‘God-broken. She holds the open door in her hand and suffers for it.’

 
The magus would hear no more. By nature he could never tolerate the suggestion of a threat. Already a private hunger was gripping him, excluding all doubt. This was not the first time he had performed the extraordinarily difficult magic of clairvoyance, but never before had he felt anything like the shock of recognition and sympathy that had come when the fabled prophetess cried his name. He had arrived at the border of revelations and mysteries that had been lost for millennia. A whim, a foolish whim had opened the path to this vanished age of heroes, men and women who battled and bartered with spirits as familiarly as quarrelling neighbours. He could not turn his back on it.

 
Most of all, he could not turn his back on her. Cassandra! Who saw what no one else could see and was despised for it. And to have now become one of her visions, himself! – no wonder, really, that he forgot Helen and, for the first time, found himself falling in love.

 
The spirit protested as long as he permitted it to speak, so he silenced it and then banished it. He could not let cowardice hold him back. He would find another guide to return him to his true body, when the time came.

 
Then, a spectre among the towers of Troy, he made himself go out into the night and look for her.

 
He could, perhaps, have drifted through the many-gated city that night like the ghost of twenty centuries of songs and stories, watching the flesh-and-blood men and women whose short and barbaric lives were destined to be rendered undying by almost as many poets as there were years. From the top of one wall he looked westwards across the plain and saw the ominous light of watch-fires. There, he supposed, slept men whom time would remember as all but gods themselves. But nothing in all this world of bronze and fire and brutality was worth anything at all next to the one woman they despised.

 
He searched fruitlessly. There was no order to the buildings that he could discern and, once inside, no arrangement of rooms he could recognise. After what was a long time measured by the turning sky of that place and age, he found himself once again in the painted hall where he had begun. The fire was out. Beetles and rats stirred in the shadows.

 
She was there, waiting for him. She greeted his ghost by name.

 
They spoke for a long time, the prophetess and the phantom, in a language that would have sounded like raving to anyone in the city. They spoke like equals. In his thirty-odd years of studying the breadth of creation, celestial and sublunary, the magus had always known each being he conversed with to be either lesser or (rarely) greater than himself, and accordingly had always listened humbly or interrogated imperiously. That night, for the first time, he simply heard and answered.

 
When the high window-slits began to hint at dawn, she told him he had to leave.

 
‘I must see you again,’ he said. She knelt near the fire-pit, hands clasped around herself. Even though he was free of his flesh, he longed to touch her. She was as beautiful as wisdom. ‘Tell me,’ he begged, ‘how and when I can find you.’

 
‘I cannot, but I know you will.’

 
He felt joy surge in his thoughts just as if his heart had leaped under bone. ‘I will return as soon as I have the power. The next night.’

 
‘You will not.’

 
‘I will. I swear it.’

 
‘No.’ She crouched lower, quivering slightly like a dying flame. ‘But you will see me again.’

 
He remembered the trickle of blood from her mouth. ‘How can I leave you here?’ his tongueless voice said. ‘I know as you do what will happen, in this very room.’

 
She looked at the statue of the goddess, then back at him.

 
‘Then you know what will happen, whether you wish it or not.’

 
‘I would use all my power to spare you that, if I could.’ He could not bear the thought: the screams of terror as the city burned, the bronze armour hot with blood and the light of the flames, an enemy emptying ten years of fury onto her. This was why he had sworn never to love. Love enmeshed you in the horrors of a fallen world.

 
‘There is no such power. Yet because you hear me and wish me kindness, you will see me again.’

 
‘Then tell me how! Teach me the art by which I can return!’

 
‘You will not return.’

 
In the east, above the mountains, a rich desert blue was spreading skywards. The magus knew he must go, but at that moment he would have surrendered his soul to stay a phantom at her side for ever.

 
‘Where, then? Tell me only where and I will work without cease or rest until I have found the way that leads me back to you.’

 
‘I cannot say. Yet you came to me and did not turn away and so you will see me again, even if I wait a thousand winters.’

 
‘A thousand winters?’ he whispered.

 
‘And more. Twice a thousand. And more. The road-god leads me a long road. Now go. You must.’

 
It was true, though he fought against it. ‘But when?’ he cried, as the heavens opened wide to welcome the unseen sun and he began to slip away. ‘When?’ She blew on his ghost and the breath lifted him up like a feathered seed, and then there he was, lying on the floor of his laboratory late on a January night in the year 1537, his staff on the floor beside him and his face wet with tears.

Eighteen

It took Gav
a very long time to make up his mind to go outside.

 
For a year and more he’d dreaded the sight of Miss Grey. Since he’d got to grips with the awful discovery that she wasn’t real, he’d wished for nothing more than never to see her again.

 
She stood unmoving, her shapeless cloak gathered around her, looking at the window from which he looked at her. The unkempt curtains of her hair hid her face. Even so, Gav could tell she was watching him, as he’d so often seen her watching, waiting. The alien murmurs floated around him all the while.

 
He remembered how he used to talk to her, back in the time before he’d understood that she wasn’t supposed to be there. It had never seemed to matter that she didn’t answer.

 
He’d never be that child again. That particular happiness was dead and buried. There was no unlearning what he’d learned so painfully from Mum and Dad and Mr Bushy and everyone else. Yet his heart had betrayed him, leaping with joy when he’d seen her, just the way it always used to.

 
He tiptoed to the front door and opened it as quietly as he could. He was afraid she might have vanished in the interval, but as the night air poured in, he saw her there still, waiting. Hester had hung his coat by the door. He slipped it on.

 
A wintry desertion lay over the road. The houses with their meagre front gardens petered out to his left into unlit barrens of fields and empty roads. Everything seemed frozen. You couldn’t imagine dawn coming, windows lighting up, people getting into cars and driving away.

 
Something about Miss Grey was different.

 
Her stillness had changed. Gav couldn’t have said how. Maybe it was just that she was standing under the lamp, interrupting its pool of bleached light like a rock jutting from the sea. He was more used to seeing her at the edge of things.

 
He remembered a word she’d said to him:
Come
.

 
It occurred to him that he had a choice. He could, if he wanted, go back inside, shut the blind and head up to his makeshift bed. That was the sort of thing he’d been doing recently when she showed up. She was easy enough to ignore when he set his heart on it, or at least she had been until she’d started climbing in trains and shouting in his ear. Still, he could close the door on her if he liked. Shut her out like a vagrant. It was in his power.