Advent (55 page)

 
His heart was going like it would explode at any minute, but for some reason Gawain found it impossible to be as afraid as he ought to be. There was something different about it. It wasn’t attacking him for a start, but no, that wasn’t the real difference. Something about its voice.

 
It sounded sad.

 
He said, ‘What did you call me?’

 
‘By your name, once-boy. White Hawk. Hawk of May. Take to your wings and flee.’

 
Its voice was so beautiful that you couldn’t be frightened when it was sad. There was a music in it that washed away any feelings that didn’t harmonise.

 
‘You’re Holly,’ he said, edging closer, and then yelped as the raised limbs stirred. They curled round in a graceful wide arc to meet at its hips, where the green woman’s torso met the mottled bark-skin below. It bent over them. A bow, he realised, amazed. It was making a courtly bow.

 
‘Holly of the bright berries. Holly of the white flower. Wintergreen Holly, queen of all the trees that are in the wood. And you, the unbelieved, you marvel at your own name. You frown at my greeting. Get you gone, while yet you can.’

 
Somewhere far in the back of his mind he recognised this as good advice. Get away from it all: the snow, the wind, the impossible creatures, the terrors and the threats. Find somewhere to hide, wait till it blows over. Wake up in the morning and everything will be back to normal.

 
Never again, he thought. No going back.

 
‘What are you doing here?’

 
‘Warning. Will you flee yet?’

 
‘You were trying . . .’ He came a little closer. ‘In the house. You tried to hurt me. Now you want me to run away.’

 
‘I am bound. I was commanded. Fetch the boy, the witch’s ward. So, I sought you. But now you are unwarded, and I warn you away. And you delay, and delay. The once-woman will find you, if you stay.’

 
A metallic chill struck through him at these last words.

 
‘Who?’

 
‘Names neither help nor harm. Go while you can.’

 
‘I . . .’ Even the wind with its white freight seemed to be trying to push him back to the gate. He bent his knees to balance, resisting. ‘I can’t. I won’t.’

 
Holly laughed, a single peal of disbelief. ‘Such valour, once-boy? So bold, little lord? So quick to forget your fear?’

 
‘Where can I go anyway?’ he whispered, half to himself.

 
‘Who can say? Who can say?’ Holly’s singsong voice rose into a weird carol. ‘Not Holly, not I. Holly cannot prophesy. Holly cannot guess or lie. Ask me not how time may go. Words are not tools for such as I. We speak only as we know.’

 
He gaped at it, mesmerised by the sweet urgency of its song, unable not to notice the green swell of its breasts as it stretched its head up to serenade the storm. It was the most appalling and the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

 
It slid towards him, ploughing furrows in the snow. He flinched, but there was no point running; he’d seen what those thorn-fisted limbs could do. It came to within an arm’s reach and leaned down close.

 
Each tiny white flower in the cluster that circled its skull was pronged, four-petalled, blushed with the faintest pink. What should have been skin looked like polished stone, the kind of surface you find on a river pebble, so smooth that its hardness feels soft. There was a shape like a cheekbone, but no bone made it. The lips moved and changed the contours of the face, but the motion was more like flowing water than the stretching of muscles and skin. Its mouth opened wide and for a moment it was perfectly still, as if drinking the frosty cloud of his rapid breath.

 
‘My master rules me,’ it murmured slowly, measuring its words as though explaining something very simple to someone very stupid. ‘He will punish. He will cleave me to this tree. I will be unfree. But you, once-boy, he will slay. Murder is done already.’

 
‘Your master?’ Gawain stammered, in a daze. ‘Who—’

 
A distant howl fetched over the wind. Iron dread twisted in his stomach. Muffled though it was, he recognised the sound.

 
The black dog was somewhere near, and it was hunting.

 
He stared around wildly, his trance broken. Into the house? But the door was smashed, there was no refuge there. In every other direction he saw nothing but a grey-white curtain. He thought Holly was humming,
Flee, flee, flee
, but maybe it was only the surge of the wind, the flakes whistling past his ear. Dizzy with fear, disoriented, he lurched a few hurried steps away from where the howl had come from. Almost at once he found himself with no bearings at all. He might be running into the beast’s jaws. It could be anywhere, screened by the blizzard. He’d never see it until it was on top of him.

 
A strangled squeal came from behind. He twisted round and saw a blurry shape falling into the snow near Holly’s trunk-feet, flailing, yelping. ‘Small boy, wrong boy,’ the tree sang, and as the shape righted itself Gawain saw that it was indeed a child, arms thrashing, shrieking out incomprehensible words from a throat constricted by terror. Fighting to scramble through the thickening drifts, the boy backed away from Holly, then spun round, tripped over his strange long coat and fell into the snow again right beside Gawain. At once he pushed himself up and rammed his head blindly into Gav’s chest, sending them both sprawling.

 
The howl came again, much closer.

 
‘Wait!’ Gawain shouted, as the boy tried to scramble away on all fours. To his astonishment he saw it was the Chinese kid, Horace, almost unrecognisable with his hair caked with snow and his face bloodless and terror-slack. Limbs windmilling, he shrieked as if the furies were at his heels.

 
Gawain had time for no more than that instant’s astonishment before a rippling black shape appeared at the edge of visibility. With impossible speed it grew and gathered and became the massive dog, hurtling towards them, white spray flying up from its paws, eyes bright as headlamps, fiery spittle trailing from its open mouth like sparks struck from flint. There was a sound like a rattle of stiff leaves, and Gav, whose mouth had opened for a scream he never had time to utter, sensed rather than saw something huge come falling out of the blizzard to his left. The dog sprang. He fell backwards. The thing whistled in front of him and struck the beast down as if it had run into a wall.

 
It was Holly. Its other limb was already sweeping down as the dog tried to rise to its feet, thudding into its flank and knocking it sideways.

 
‘Get you gone, make haste, run,’ Holly sang. The limb pressed down on the furious animal, pinning it in the snow. ‘Maybe you’ll return. Go!’

 
‘I—’

 
The face with the blood-red eyes swung towards him and shrieked, a single wordless note with a force like a fist. Gawain spun away, lost his footing, fell again. He’d tripped over the kid, who was sprawled in the snow, motionless as if he’d been shot. Without thinking what he was doing, Gav wrestled his arms under the body and hauled Horace onto his shoulder. One glimpse of the unmanning terror on the boy’s face had been enough for him to know he couldn’t leave him there. Horace had passed out completely, a dead sodden weight, but he was a small and wiry kid and Gav managed to lift him. There was a continuous grunting and gnashing behind, the sound of the dog’s struggle. He staggered away as fast as he could. By sheer luck he ran into the driveway after only a few steps. His bare feet felt the pitted road under the snow instead of grass, and though his head was spinning with panic and the snowfall still blanked his view in every direction he could at least work out which way was uphill, towards the gate. Carrying Horace in a wet tangle over his shoulder, he forced himself up the slope, keeping the buried track under his feet. The inert body bumped and banged against him, and after only twenty steps the weight felt as if it might pop his shoulder out of its socket. He ploughed on, away from the snarling and thrashing. Abruptly a grey wall rose in front like a silent wave: the laurel hedge. There were the gateposts, and a ribbed pattern in the carpet of snow that had to be where the cattle grid was. He turned round the gatepost into the lane and the southwest wind struck him full in the face.

 
The snow tried to burrow inside him, into his panting mouth, his ears, stinging his eyes, finding every crevice in his clothes. He strained his ears for any sound from behind, terrified that some pursuer was following through the murk, but it was impossible to hear anything else now. There was no sign of the road at all. There was no sign of anything except stems and twigs in the hedge, fractured inches not yet blanketed. He dragged his legs through a heavy sheet of nothing. He told himself it wasn’t far to the crossroads, and just below where the roads met he’d seen the outermost houses of some village. Anywhere safe, anywhere normal.

 
The barrier between him and madness felt thin as a sheet of ice. Each step became its own odyssey. Hauling one leg up, swinging forward, the dead weight on his left shoulder a fraction heavier each time, like a rack turning by inches, then staggering down into the snow again, fighting the impulse to fall. Only desperation kept him going. Anything could be coming through the blizzard. He’d never hear it or see it till it was on him. The agonising passage, step after step after step, seemed to make no difference. The sea of white stretched ahead and waited patiently for him to sink. He began to doubt the crossroads still existed, or the village he thought he’d seen. The storm might have wiped it all away, erasing the world, leaving only hideous impossible things. He was in a nightmare of clutching urgency and slow motion. He’d had bad dreams like this many times, when you had to get somewhere but couldn’t and the more you struggled the heavier the invisible manacles became. Those dreams had come true now, like the other ones. Fire and blackness and the end of the world. The fire and blackness were close behind, snarling, raging.

 
He thought about dropping Horace so he could run, but it couldn’t be much further, surely it couldn’t, and despite the burning ache all down his left side he didn’t have it in him to leave the kid to be buried alive in a blizzard, or worse. If he was even alive. Horace flopped on Gawain’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. His weird long coat kept bunching up in Gav’s face and dislodging snow into his eyes. It didn’t matter; he could hardly have been more blind anyway. There was nothing to see even when he managed to raise his head against the relentless wind. Even the broken spackle of twigs in the hedge was close to vanishing now. He panicked when he saw that; once there was only unbroken grey-white in every direction, what would he do? There’d be nothing to do, nothing but stop where he was and fall to his knees and wait to die.

 
A shape coalesced out of the spinning chaos. An object, some indication of an enduring world. He struggled the last few paces towards it, no longer caring what it might be. Each breath burned more than the last. He knew that unless he found something other than the blizzard there would soon be no more breath at all.

 
The object stuck out from the hedge like a low wall. Two more excruciating steps and it turned into a car, motionless in the road, already caked on the windward side with a deep layer of snow. Collapsing in the tiny patch of shelter it gave, Gawain remembered passing the crashed car at the crossroads on his way towards the gate. He’d reached the junction, then. The village wasn’t far away, but he was finished. He couldn’t raise his head into the wind again, and now he’d dropped Horace at last, his arms and shoulders were perfectly clear that they wouldn’t be picking him back up. Anyway, how could he go where people were, ordinary people? If there were any left? And there was a refuge right here.

 
He hooked freezing fingers around a handle and wrenched. The car door came open, sending a sheet of snow down onto Horace. The kid was limp as a corpse. Gav tried to feel his neck, but his own fingers were so numb they’d never have been able to detect a pulse. There was something there, though, a metallic touch, a silky movement and a thin gleam. Blinking, he saw the silver chain of a necklace tucked inside the comatose boy’s jumper.

 
Gav got his arms under his shoulders and shoved him up into the back seat of the car, then slid him all the way along the seat, into a strangely quiet haven of cold blue twilight. The windows on the other side were completely blanked by snow. There was no warmth, but being sheltered from the wind was almost as good. Gav brushed snow away from the kid and examined his slack and colourless face. Air stirred weakly around the open mouth. Not dead yet.