Black Feathers (10 page)

This time, the boy who comes to Megan in the night country is not the same boy.

He looks the same and is just as beautiful with his pale skin and gentle manner, but he is troubled. He stands beside her bed and weeps the tears of someone who has lost something very precious. Not a possession, perhaps not even a beloved one, but something even more valuable. She sees the hole in the boy’s chest. It is a ragged-edged wound. Something has sawn through his sternum and ribs. The hole has been made hastily and without care. A silvery light illuminates the cavity.

The boy’s heart has been taken away.

The boy beckons and Megan rises from her bed, the touch of the night country on her skin and behind her eyes like liquid silver, cool and enticing. She follows him. Out through the front door again but as soon as it closes behind them she sees that they are not in Beckby village any more. Though she has never seen this landscape, she has heard about it. She knows what it is.

Ruins surround them. Buildings so great that even their smashed remains are four or five times the height of her family’s cottage. The valleys between these fallen edifices, where the streets once ran, are blocked by rubble and things she doesn’t understand. Things from before the Black Dawn.

The boy takes her hand. His fingers are cold as a plough blade on a winter’s dawn but his skin is milk smooth and his touch is something like the flow of water in the Usky River. He leads her between the buildings in this broken world. Soon the buildings are far behind them and they are walking on roads of black stone avoiding great fissures which have split them apart – these they fly over at his behest. Farther along, the cracks deepen and widen until they are walking beside canyons which extend deep into the earth. The bodies of people and animals lie everywhere, decaying and pecked upon by grey-beaked rooks. Megan is undisturbed by any of it. She trusts this boy from the night country. If she had a brother, he would be like this.

The boy brings her to a forest of dead trees. The remains of their trunks and branches are either white, and glow bonelike in the darkness, or are black as soot. They walk through the dead wood and the moon lights their way, a silver disk shining through clouds of smoke. They come to a single tree in a broad clearing, gnarled and warped and blackened, straining under the weight of the night sky. In the tree sit three crows, cawing into the night, cawing at Megan and the boy.

He turns to her, weeping and smiling, and for the first time since she has entered the night country with him, Megan is moved. She steps towards the boy to embrace him and ease his wound. But when she reaches him he is gone. She looks around the clearing and all that is left is the black tree and its three cawing crows. The rest of the forest is gone too: a barren land rolls away in every direction, a land where fires burn on every horizon.

She looks into her hand. She holds the boy’s still-beating heart.

Judith and Gordon stepped off the main track through Covey Wood, avoiding thickets of bramble and tall patches of nettle. The wind, which had torn so many limbs from unprotected or sickening trees, still shouldered its way through the canopy. Living timber creaked and complained overhead and Gordon found himself looking up often.

“Maybe this wasn’t the best choice,” he said.

They could have taken the disused bridleway and made the abandoned railway tunnel their goal or walked along the open and well-signposted track through the fields to what they’d always called the Yonder Tree. But they’d both agreed on the Thousand-Year-Old Oak in Covey Wood. Since the Ward had served their warrant on their family, the rest of the world seemed too exposed.

“It’s fine,” said Judith. “It’s perfect. I can hear the wind blowing all the badness from the world.”

It was an attractive idea but Gordon didn’t believe it. All the wind could do was bring more badness with it. But letting Jude be happy was more important than arguing. Especially now. They moved with skill through the difficult landscape, knowing the way around thickets and finding paths through low yew and rhododendron that would have turned a visiting walker back to the main path. When the growth thinned and opened up they were on the far side of Covey Wood. Seeing the clearing in the trees and the giant at its centre, Gordon knew Jude had been right all along. This was the best place to sit and talk, in the protection of the Thousand-year-old Oak.

The oak was a gnarly giant. Rough-barked and ivy-covered on one side of its gargantuan trunk, it spread its thick limbs up and outwards in perfect, symmetrical subdivisions. In the summertime it looked like a vast green mushroom on a mottled stalk. Now, with October gales roaring and snatching at everything, all its leaves were on the forest floor. They weren’t the only thing it had lost.

“Oh no,” said Gordon.

Judith had already seen the damage. One of the oak’s massive lower limbs had succumbed to the harrying of the wind. The bough had once extended from the main trunk almost horizontally, supporting a mass of smaller branches. Now it lay along the ground directly below its point of dislocation. It had made a deep score in the body of the oak, tearing a thick section away as it fell and leaving exposed a deep, almost white wound.

“This must have just happened,” said Judith. She put her hands into the rent in the oak’s trunk. “It’s damp. You can smell the sap.”

The oak had always been a symbol of power and longevity for Gordon. One thing that fascinated him about trees was that they could live for hundreds of years. They didn’t know how old the oak was but it had always seemed a thousand years old to all of them, and now here it was, wounded by the wind.

“We can sit on the snapped bough,” said Judith. “The oak would want us to use it. And it’ll be safer too. I don’t think there’s much chance of anything falling on top of what’s already come down.”

Gordon didn’t like to point out that it was more likely to happen here than anywhere else – especially if the tree was dying. But he sat across the log anyway, riding it, and Judith faced him in the same position. For a long time they did nothing but listen to the angry wind. It was as though the world were tearing out its own hair.

“Do you think we should go?” asked Gordon.

“If we don’t go, they’ll come and get us. It’ll be like getting arrested.”

“Collected.”

“What?”

“They said they’d ‘collect’ us.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments.

“What do you think they want to find out?” asked Judith.

“I don’t know. And I don’t know why we have to go in there to answer their questions. Why couldn’t they have asked us there and then?”

“Probably because Dad would have got his shotgun,” said Judith, grinning.

“He wasn’t far off it. But then all the anger just went out of him. He looked frightened, Jude. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

Judith looked away. Not too far from the tree was the edge of Covey Wood and beyond that an expanse of field where no crops had grown for two years. Even now the field’s surface was exposed and stony. Barely a weed would take hold in it, so spent was the soil. The wind had dried the top layer of the earth and whenever it wasn’t raining, the wind lifted the soil and blew it away as brown ghosts shrieking across the land, as brown dust devils rising up in madness. Beyond these dead patches of land, dark mountains rose against the vengeful October sky.

“Angela’s coming home,” she said eventually.

“How come? I thought she had a job down there while she studies.”

“She’s coming home for good.”

“But why? She hasn’t finished. She won’t get her degree.”

“No. Probably not.”

Judith leaned forwards and took her brother’s hands in hers.

“I asked Mum and Dad to let me tell you.” Tears swelled in her eyes. “She’s sick, Gordon. The campus doctors don’t know what it is and she can’t get any tests done to find out more. She’s too unwell to attend lectures. All she can do is come home.”

“Why can’t they just find out what’s wrong with her and give her the right kind of medicine?”

“No one can get those kinds of tests any more unless it’s part of an epidemic. There’s no money for the hospitals now. You’d be lucky to get treatment for a broken arm.”

“Well Dad can pay, then. He can get her to see a private doctor.”

Judith looked away.

“Dad doesn’t have that kind of money any more, Gordon. All we have is the house and the garden and the animals. And that’s a lot more than most people.”

Gordon now looked out across the barren fields. He spoke with the voice of a little boy.

“Everything’s changed, hasn’t it?”

Judith didn’t answer. She scooted towards him and wrapped him into her breast. She held him that way while they listened to the wood around them, listened to the trees trying to resist the power of the wind. From time to time, in other parts of the wood, they heard a splintering snap as more branches lost the battle. Something flashed down past them, fast on the air. It settled into the dry leaves and acorns covering the ground. Judith sat back and pointed.

“Look there.”

“Where?”

“Just there. A white feather.”

“So what?”

“Finding a white feather is a sign you’ve been blessed by an angel.”

Gordon sat back.

“Really? Is that true?”

“I believe it.”

He almost smiled.

“Maybe that means Angela will be OK,” he said. “Maybe it’s a blessing for her.”

Judith nodded, happy for a moment in spite of everything.

“Jude?”

Gordon couldn’t keep the tension from his voice.

“What is it?”

“What do black feathers mean?”

She shrugged.

“Black feathers? I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

His grey eyes focussed in the distance.

“Those are the only ones I ever see.”

Judith hopped off the fallen bough and snatched up the white feather before the wind could whip it away again.

“Not anymore,” she said, poking it into the breast pocket of his coat. She gave him a small kiss. Standing back she smiled and cocked her head, looking at him in a way he didn’t understand. She turned, kicking through the oak leaves as she walked away.

“We should go back,” she said. “You know how Mum worries when you stay out too long.”

Gordon slid off the log, landing evenly on both feet.

“She’s never like that with you,” he said.

“You’re the youngest. They both worry about you the most.”

They walked home in silence, Judith leading the way and Gordon losing himself in the landscape and the motion of the elements. Judith hadn’t been able to answer his question about feathers. Her reticence on the matter made him think the worst; if white was a blessing then black must be a curse. Once he’d formed the idea, it was hard to think of anything else.

By the time they reached the door in the back wall of the garden, Gordon had made up his mind to sit down and talk to his mother properly about the crows and their feathers, ask her what she really thought it all meant. When Judith stepped through the door, having shouldered it to get it open, she froze, preventing Gordon from following her.

“What is it, Jude?”

“Go back.”

“Why?”

She didn’t turn to him but whispered as loudly as she could.

“The Ward. They’re here. They’ve seen me.”

She stepped through into the garden, turning to Gordon as she pushed the old door closed.

“They don’t know you’re here, Gordon. You should hide.”

Her eyes spoke more than her words. Whatever she had seen in the garden had terrified her. Enough to tell him to get away. The door was almost closed now, her eyes were preparing to lie to whoever was approaching. She smiled first, though, wiping tears away and making herself look normal, like a girl coming home from a walk on her own.

“Run, Gordon!” she whispered. And as the gate closed, a softer breath passed through:

“I love you.”

Not knowing why, Gordon did as he was told. The nearest cover was the hedges of the abandoned bridleway. In thirty paces he was there, making himself tiny beyond a wall of blackthorn and looking back through the tangle of barbed branches. The old green door with its rusted hinges was still closed but he could hear voices: angry shouts and demands indistinct on the wind. Then the door was wrenched open and two men came out, one with his hand clamped around Judith’s wrist. Gordon shrank and tried to be still but his body betrayed him, his heart beating so loud and hard he could hear nothing else. His whole body shook. The men were dressed in the same grey raincoats, double breasted and tied at the waist with smart, stiff belts. They both wore the same grey, brimmed hats. But these were not Skelton and Pike; to Gordon they seemed like lesser versions, not sheriffs but foot soldiers.

“Where is he?” shouted the one holding his sister.

Gordon’s fear turned to rage. He wanted to rush back and tear the man’s hands from her, beat him with fists and feet and then drag Judith to safety. It was his duty to Judith, the one who’d always had the greatest love and care for him, more than his own mother. Yet rage wasn’t enough and he already knew it. He wasn’t strong enough to free her and his actions would only make things worse. In the moment when he might have rushed the two Wardsmen, he faltered. His fear returned, turning his limbs to lead.

I’m only a boy. I don’t stand a chance.

He was too frightened to make good on what he knew to be right. That made him a coward, didn’t it?

One of the men was demanding answers from his sister, yanking and shaking her by the arm.

“I’ve already told you,” said Judith. “I haven’t seen him since I went out. He’s probably hiding in the attic.”

“The attic?” said the other man.

“That’s where he usually goes when he’s frightened. You lot turning up like this has probably scared him half to death.”

The two men pushed Judith back through the door. Gordon saw her looking his way but she couldn’t see him. The green door was forced shut. He allowed himself a small grin; the attic? That was a brilliant lie. He had hidden in the attic once after an argument with his father but that was years ago. The smile dropped away fast.

The Ward had turned up a week early.