Advent (72 page)

 
Go.

 
On his left hand he wore the plain brown ring that looked as if it was made of wood, though it was not. On his head was a whale mask. He was not merely wearing it, the way it had been made to be worn over on the other side of the world, in that other forest, among the fern-green moss and the wet hemlocks and the cold ocean inlets. More than that: its great oval eyes were his eyes, its long mouth his mouth, its voice his voice.

 
He went down to the rocks. The trees behind him were thick with crows. They broke their silence all at once, the shore echoing with their chafing uproar. When his feet entered the river he felt an inexpressibly huge joy. He kept going, losing his footing as the tide nudged him.

 
Amid the welter of life and sound around him the touch of water recalled a liquid whisper,
Find my child, find my child, find my child
.

 
I made a promise, he remembered.

 
Then keep it
, he answered with his other voice, as his head slipped under the water and the boy began to drown.

The mermaid rose from the river, sinuous as an eel, ghost-pale, a nacreous sheen glistening where water slid away. Lank and weedy tendrils clung to her. Gawain and Marina stood at the very edge of the tide. The girl’s fingers were still on the boy’s hand where she’d been trying to prise herself out of his grip. They went limp. Her lopsided mouth fell open.

 
This time Gawain saw in the flesh what he’d guessed at before: the family resemblance. Though one face belonged to a terrified and overwhelmed child, and the other was as inhuman as a marble statue dredged up from a thousand forgotten and submerged years, they were mother and daughter.

 
The mother knew it. She reached her white arms forward as she came higher up the beach.

 
The daughter had not yet understood.

 
‘Go on,’ Gawain said. ‘That’s her.’ He let go of Marina’s wrist.

 
‘But . . .’ Marina stammered. ‘I . . .’

 
She took two hesitant steps into the river, towards the embrace. Then they heard the hoarse and desperate call from the woods again. ‘. . . Marina!’ The mermaid froze, and the boy and the girl spun round. None of them could yet see Tristram Uren, though he was coming down the path from the house in a wild delirium, heedless of his old limbs and wheezing lungs.

 
But they did see Gwen.

 
She stood unsteadily atop the earth wall bordering the footpath, staff planted in the snow. A burning radiance writhed around its tip. At the sight of her Marina clutched Gawain’s arm in absolute terror. ‘It’s OK,’ he told her, though his jaw was clenched and his heart thudding. ‘Go to your mum. Go on. She can’t come much closer, she belongs in the sea. Quick!’

 
Gwen began descending towards them, undergrowth snapping as she forced herself along.

 
‘Daddy—’ Marina began.

 
‘Now!’ Gawain said, and shoved her into the water.

 
It was his aunt. He could see her clearly enough now despite the twilight, face on, for the first time. Her face was all wrong. Or rather it was exactly the same face, but wrong on the inside, or put together wrongly; he couldn’t figure out exactly where the wrongness was, but it was so horrific to look at that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand in place watching it approach, and he refused to collapse or run away or die of horror until he knew Marina was safe; he
refused
.

 
Alas, Marina had known very little fear and stress in her thirteen hidden years. Being pulled so hard in so many directions was too much for her. She sank to her knees in the shallows, whimpering, clinging with one wet fist to the hem of Gawain’s trousers, squeezing her eyes shut. He knew he ought to kick her away, do anything to get her out into the icy river, but she was holding on to him as if he was the last tether stopping her from sinking, and he couldn’t do it. Her desperate grip anchored him; all he could do was watch as the mermaid and the warlock approached, one from the shore, one from the sea.

 
Swanny beckoned urgently as she rose higher. Gawain could feel what it cost her to come so far up into the air. Unlike when she’d leaped into Horace’s boat, or when fifteen years before she’d seen Tristram walking by this very cove in moonlight, the ring was not nearby, and without the passage it opened she could not be truly a woman rather than the sea-image of one. She dropped to a crawl and forced herself up the strand, straining the fingers of one hand towards her terrified child. Her mouth was working, but the watery whisper Gawain remembered was inaudible against the clamour of the crows on the far bank. She mouthed her child’s name. Marina couldn’t hear or see it; head bent, hands over her face, she moaned wordlessly to herself, over and over again.

 
‘Go on,’ Gav begged her. ‘Please. It’s her. Please go.’

 
The mermaid’s hand, trembling, stretched out and touched her cheek.

 
Marina stopped shuddering and opened her eyes. Her skin remembered the mother’s touch, perhaps. The memory worked its way gradually inwards, towards her heart.

 
Above them, on the beach, the warlock steadied herself, raised her staff to her lips and spoke three words. The spell was barely more than a laboured whisper, but Gawain heard it and recoiled in dread. To his ears the words carved through the air like stones from a sling, and in the passage they made he felt fiery presences thronging. The glow at the end of her staff blazed up. She raised it with both hands and pointed it down towards where the mermaid and her daughter knelt together in ankle-deep water.

 
Swanny twisted and stiffened as if struck by lightning. She fell on her back, her head tossed up on the sand. Her legs thrashed in the shallows.

 
‘Mummy!’ Marina screamed. ‘Mummy!’ She clung to the shuddering white shoulders. Swanny’s arms tried to curl over the child, but the agony gripped them again and they pounded on the sand. She was drowning in air, while the invisible tormentors pinned and racked her.

 
Gawain’s head was buzzing. Everything was a chaos of noise. The distant cawing, shouts from the trees, the girl’s anguished cries, the air thrumming and burning, his own desperate rage. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted, not knowing which part of the cacophony he wanted silent. He couldn’t think. ‘Stop it!’ That was it: he had to stop her. Consumed with horror and fury, he forgot to be afraid. ‘Stop!’ He gripped the rowan stick so hard it hurt his numbed hands and started up the beach. He didn’t see his aunt any more. No one could have. The merciless bitterness in the warlock’s face had transformed it. He saw only a thin hunched woman who had no power over him. He yelled and broke into a run, raising the stick over his head.

 
A whirring shadow swamped the last light. Vast black wings swooped over Gawain’s head. Then Corbo was standing in front of him, blocking his way.

 
The horrible broken voice behind it said, ‘Kill the boy.’

 
Gawain stared into its obsidian eyes.

 
The hooked mouth opened.

 
Kaaaark

 
‘Corbo?’

 
It took a step forward. Its talons raked deep marks in the sand.

 
‘Run,’ it said.

 
A gurgling, choking sound had begun behind him. Swanny fought to speak, while the tide ebbed further from her. Marina sobbed over her dying mother, shouting and crying all at once, her hands looking for some part of the pale wet flesh to hold.

 
‘Let me past, Corbo,’ Gawain said, as steadily as he could.

 
‘Not now. Told to kill. Run.’

 
The crow-thing stepped closer again, then suddenly threw back its head and screeched. ‘Run. Run. Run run run.’

 
It came at him, a blur of wings and claws. Gawain swung the walking stick reflexively. A fast and angry blow might have hurt it, but he’d never learned to fight. Corbo swayed away from the rowan staff with implausible grace, wings spreading, and lifted itself into the air. One foot swept out and clutched the stick, and with the next huge thrust of the wings wrenched it out of Gawain’s grasp. He stumbled backwards, hands stinging. ‘Run run,’ Corbo cawed again, neck stretching. It dropped the stick and landed, hopping closer. ‘Run. Dive.’ Gawain scrambled back into the water. ‘Go,
wraaaaak
. Go.’ It bounced forward and beat the great wings again. Its talons flashed out with grotesque speed. He flung himself to one side, landed with salt water drenching his face, righted himself, spluttering and gasping. He was quite certain now that he was going to die, but, unbearably, that certainty was less tormenting than the girl’s pitiful cries and her mother’s final agony, the knowledge that he’d failed them.

 
Corbo alit on the shore, balancing itself. Beside it the mermaid shivered weakly, her thrashing reduced to spasmodic quivers. The glimpse of Marina’s grief-struck face shredded Gawain’s heart.

 
‘Kill him now!’ another voice shrieked. ‘Now!’

 
Even Corbo’s expressionless cries sounded like a roar of misery. ‘
Rrraaaak
,’ it groaned. ‘Flee, flee,
wraaaa
.’ It launched itself, wings pounding air, gaining purchase, rising.

 
Gawain pushed himself upright, splashed three steps towards the open river and threw himself down as the hideous shadow spread over him and plummeted. This time he felt talons tearing his back. His mouth filled, drowning his scream. Salt burned in the wounds as if the claws had stuck to him and were burrowing down to his bones. He thrust his head up to gulp air and howl in torment. The whole twilit scene began to swim and blur. Hazily, he saw the monstrous bird rising above him again, screeching as bitterly as he was, preparing to lunge. He saw the warlock hobbling out onto exposed rocks that jutted out into the falling tide, looking for a better view while her servant tore him apart. Scrabbling desperately against the muddy seabed, he took a huge breath and shoved himself down, the sky darkening above him again as Corbo swooped.

 
The water seemed to embrace him, not dense and sluggish but easy as air; he slipped right down to the submerged rock, shaping himself low and flat like a diving cormorant. There was a bubbling commotion on the surface above, and maybe the plunging claws didn’t reach him, though the torture of the open wounds in his back was so fierce he could feel nothing else there anyway. Through eyes misting with grief and pain he saw the impenetrable murk ahead, the weed-covered depths where the drowned valley sank away below the lowest tides. It seemed like a peaceful, mercifully silent darkness, like death. He swam down towards it, kicking.

 
The water dimmed and then swirled again, with a strangely inert sound. Gawain rolled as he swam and, looking upwards, saw small whirlpools where Corbo’s claws had pierced the surface and withdrawn. Ribbons of blood fanned out in the agitated water. He kicked up quickly. His head broke into air and he found himself screaming; when the pain had emptied his lungs he gasped to refill them. The warlock had picked her way out to a shelf of kelp-draped rock far out from the shore. She stood as if on a tiny island, as far as she could go, on the brink of deep water, pointing to where Gawain had surfaced, shouting something in a voice as harsh and almost as inhuman as Corbo’s racking cries. Above, the wings beat, wheeled, tipped as it plunged once more.

 
He twisted to dive. His back felt like it must have broken. He couldn’t tell whether the darkness gathering around his vision was the falling shadow above or the silted mud below or the coming night or just his own life bleeding out of him. He sank, welcoming the bite of the cold. It damped the fire in his gouged back. He was shrinking inside himself. Soon he’d contract to nothing. The splash of Corbo’s feet scything through the surface above sounded dull, almost gentle. He was down among the swaying weeds, where everything was slow and placid. Only his lungs were still protesting, burning as the last draught of air expired. They would calm too, once he filled them with water. Everything would go quiet. Quiet as Miss Grey.

 
He felt the deep, enduring plenitude, above and beneath. His memory filled with her goodbye kiss. The last kiss, she’d told him. Earth and sky had opened as her lips touched his, the world going on without her, without him.