Black Feathers (21 page)

Brooke plucked and gutted the rooks with less distaste than Gordon expected. She discarded the feet and the heads but used as much of the birds as she could to make a kind of stew with herbs gathered nearby.

When the food was ready, John Palmer ate with reluctance and complained the meat was tainted and bitter. He didn’t finish his meal. Brooke ate slowly and thoughtfully and finished her portion without serving herself any more. To Gordon the stew tasted better than anything his mother had ever made. He took a second helping and ate with gusto while the other two looked on. Each mouthful seemed to charge him. All the weakness he’d felt that morning evaporated, to be replaced with a sense of vitality and clarity. It was how he imagined people felt after too much coffee. When John and Brooke Palmer continued to decline more food from the pot, Gordon finished it and said a silent prayer:

Thank you for your strength and sacrifice.

They walk for the rest of the day, stopping sometimes to look across the land. The ridge path seems endless. At some point in the afternoon Mr Keeper finds another path, barely noticeable, which leads off the ridge in a zigzag.

Going downhill is hard work on her knees and Megan takes it slowly, resting often. She has never walked this far before and certainly the load on her back is heavy. When the gradient levels out she almost cries with relief. The path disappears but Mr Keeper seems to know where he’s going. The land becomes dense with broad areas of bramble, rambling wild roses, now autumnal and flowerless, and hedgerows that have become impenetrable walls of thorn. They pass through it all, Mr Keeper finding gaps where she sees only barriers, and enter a woodland of birch, the bark of every tree curling and peeling like dead white skin. The breeze causes the bark to rustle and Megan is reminded of the book and the sound its pages make as she turns them.

The broadly-spaced birch trees give way to oak and pine and then sycamore and beech. They reach an open tract of marsh grass. She sees willow trees and knows they must be close to water.

“I need to stop,” she calls to Mr Keeper.

He turns back.

“It’s not much farther, Megan. Just into this wood.” He points to a grey mass of beech trees only an acre or more away across the tussocked grassland. “Can you make it that far?”

She nods and follows. They pass willows to their right and she can smell the river beyond. It’s the Usky – she would know the scent of its waters anywhere. Its familiarity is a comfort that makes the last part of the hike more bearable. They enter the beech wood and the trees there are majestic, silent grey beasts which rise high and noble into the air. Mr Keeper stops, shrugs off his pack and lowers it to the ground. He stretches forwards and backwards a few times and then squats to ease out his legs. Megan drops her pack as though she has been carrying a boulder, and collapses to the ground.

The beech trees have left a space among themselves, roughly circular and clear of obstructions, save for the odd fallen branch. These Mr Keeper gathers together in preparation for a fire.

“Don’t sprawl for too long,” he says after a while, “or you’ll have no energy left at all. Come on, I’ve got a job for you.”

She groans and rises to her feet.

Mr Keeper is searching among the beech trees and soon he finds what he’s looking for: a clump of hazel. Its long, thin branches reach straight up from a central stump of trunk. The nuts have fallen and many remain untouched, though it’s obvious the squirrels have had their share. She pockets several handfuls of the nuts while Mr Keeper uses a long, heavy blade to separate the hazel branches from their trunk.

Together they carry bundles of hazel back to their clearing and Mr Keeper begins to build a dwelling for them. First he marks out a circle by forcing the thicker ends of the sturdier hazel branches deep into the soft earth, twenty-eight uprights which he then bends towards the centre in opposing pairs, lashing them together with twine. He weaves the thinnest branches between the uprights, creating five lateral rings which hold the dome together. From time to time he takes a feather or some dried herbs or the claw of an animal and builds them into the weave of the roundhouse.

When this is complete Megan helps him wrap the structure. They use a fine, sheer cloth the colour of dried lichen. This Mr Keeper has carried underneath his pack in a cylindrical bolt, which Megan had mistaken for a bedroll. They place this roll of material, thinner than paper but as strong as her coat, around the hazel branches as tightly as they can, turning the whole structure into a bubble of pale, dusty green. They secure the wrap with twine at three levels, pulling it tight and tying it off.

Mr Keeper crawls inside the roundhouse to burn sage and pine. She hears him praying in whispers. All at once she feels very safe in the presence of this ageless man. A man who seems so much like a naughty boy in the skin of an elder.

Dusk is coming.

Mr Keeper keeps the fire small but well-fed, and they boil water in a blackened pan to make tea. The temperature drops and they sit inside the roundhouse to drink it. Mr Keeper smokes in silence, baccy fumes mingling with the scent of sage and pine. Soon the only light she can see is the glow of Mr Keeper’s pipe and the flames of the small fire flickering outside the roundhouse. When Mr Keeper finishes his smoke, he rations out some food. They eat quietly and the darkness deepens.

As Megan sits, she drifts and dozes, her back resting comfortably against her pack.

She slips away.

“Do you feel him?”

Megan snaps to wakefulness. It is dark but for an indistinct and shapeless orange glow coming in from outside.

How long have I slept for?

“He’s here, Megan. Do you feel him?”

Mr Keeper’s voice is a whisper. She keeps her voice low too.

“I… I don’t know. I must have been–”

“Shh.” His voice drops so low she can barely hear it. “Listen, Megan. The Crowman is with us.”

Megan strains to hear and her heartbeat quickens. Her senses focus. Her mouth is bark-dry in an instant. But she listens, though. It isn’t footsteps she hears outside the roundhouse – its “walls” now seeming more flimsy than a layer of web – it’s the swoosh of huge, distant wings.

The wings quicken their beat, slowing some massive airborne form for landing. The wind buffets their shelter. The dome shifts and settles and the noise outside is gone. The sound of stealthy footsteps progresses near and then begins to circle the roundhouse. What flew now walks. Is this the same Crowman she saw in Covey Wood?

The footsteps stop.

She can see nothing but she senses Mr Keeper reach for some talisman at his neck and clasp it in his gnarly hand. She hears him intoning whispers so faint they might only be her imagination. Suddenly, she wants to pray.

Pray, she thinks. Before it’s too late.

Great Spirit, if this is a test, if this is part of my path then make my footsteps upon it sure and strong. Help me to endure this. Let me have the will to be everything I can be for myself and for this world.

Her terror vanishes. Gone like a pebble to the bottom of a lake. In its place she feels a radiated peace. It comes from outside the makeshift roundhouse, where the stealthy footsteps stopped. She knows –
knows
– that whatever is out there is for the good. A dark light of benevolence streams into the shelter as she hears words, spoken distinctly but in utter silence, both outside and within herself.

Have no fear, Megan Maurice, for everything you need will come to hand in the very moment of its requirement and you will fulfil your purpose here.

There is movement by the entry flap and something enters with a breath of cold air. She stiffens at the intrusion in spite of herself. A hand takes her wrist. The grip is soft and soothing, its touch blood-warm in the darkness. And all about the fingers of this hand she feels a cuff of silky feathers. Feathers, she knows without needing to see, as black as the void.

Come, Megan Maurice, I have much to share with you.

The hand draws her out into the night. She finds herself stammering.

“B-but the book. How will I remember it all?”

You can never forget. Not even the smallest detail or sensation. It is your gift. It is your curse. That is what it means to walk the Black Feathered Path. All you need is the strength to hold it, Megan, no matter what you see, no matter what you feel. Can you do that much?

There is no hesitation.

“I can. And I will. I swear it.”

They are in the night. The fire’s life is a waning glow, cooling beneath a crust of ashes, barely visible and yet the one thing that Megan can see. When this faint radiation begins to shrink she realises that she has been lifted away from the grip of the Earth by the hand of the Crowman. She rises up, feeling the branches of beech trees passing on all sides. She looks to where the arm and body of the entity which holds her must be, but she can see nothing of him. All she can feel is the rise and fall of vast wings above her and the sensation of being held near to the warm, soft breast of a bird. The Crowman rises and rises and Megan is drawn with him. Higher than she has ever risen before. Into the very beyond.

They are flying over time itself and over the woven threads of the day world and the night country. Megan is dizzy with fear of falling, not to earth – that would be to die, that would be
something
– but into oblivion where she would fall forever, away from the Great Spirit, away from time and the beautiful Earth, abandoned, irretrievable and forgotten.

They ascend through the Weave towards the stars. The Crowman takes her back once more.

Back to the boy.

Each morning when John Palmer went hunting and checked his snares, Gordon joined him. He didn’t ask to go along and John Palmer didn’t tell him he wasn’t welcome. The man regarded him with something like fear now and always looked away first if ever their eyes met.

Gordon shot wood pigeons, pheasants and rabbits with John Palmer’s air rifle, and he showed him better ways of placing and concealing his snares. Meat became plentiful. Since eating the rooks, Gordon’s healing had accelerated. He felt stronger than he’d been before the fever. He was a little taller now, a little broader. Living wild appeared to suit him.

With his returned health came the urge to move on. Not simply a need but a sense of duty. Fear of the journey and a reluctance to say goodbye to Brooke stopped him acting on what he knew to be right.

In moments when he wasn’t hunting or helping out around the camp, Gordon took his pack down to the stream where he could be alone. He would sit and look through the book Knowles had given him.

It was a sinister thing. Like a diary to which many people had made contributions, none of them knowing exactly why, or what it was they were recording. Everything related to the Crowman, but sometimes he was referred to as Black Jack, other times the Scarecrow. There were drawings in pencil, drawings in biro or even crayon – anything that had been to hand at the moment inspiration struck.

The themes of the drawings were always similar, like the nightmares he’d had ever since he was tiny. Barren forests with blackened trees and exposed earth; fallen buildings and collapsed city-scapes; bodies being washed away in flood water; lightning striking the land like warheads; dark clouds rolling over bald hillsides; diseased people crying out to heaven; starving, naked refugees with hollow bellies and pits for eyes sitting beside broken highways; cars and people and buildings falling into great cracks in the earth; lava flowing through parks and streets.

In every depiction of cataclysm, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes a tiny representation watching from afar, stood the same figure. Long dark hair hanging over his features, arms stretched wide and upwards as if in summoning, a long coat covering most of his body, and at his cuffs and ankles something like black straw or black lightning instead of fingers. Some sketches were portraits in close-up. A beak for a face, grey eyes fixed on the artist or viewer, hair like skeins of black silk and everywhere black feathers falling like snow. A few of the pictures weren’t of a man at all but were merely studies of crows, some in flight, some sitting in high branches, some lying dead in the deserted streets.

The writing was just as eerie, just as focussed.

“The Crowman feeds upon the blackened stump of England” was the title of one of the landscape drawings. There was poetry too. Pages and pages of it in dozens of different hands, all stuck into this scrapbook by some strangely obsessed chronicler:

’tis a black dawn brings the Crowman

’pon a black dawn only will he come

To the Bright Day will he lead us

On that Bright Day will his work be done

The prose entries were lurid and apocalyptic:

A dark man is coming and his coming signals the end of everything we know. He is tall and his skin is pale. His hair is as black as the wings of a raven. His basalt eyes are mined from the centre of the Earth. They sparkle even as he watches the world destroy itself. I see him high on hillsides watching death sweep the valleys. I see him in trees, perched and cackling. I see him among the ruins of the towns and cities, striding between the heaped-up dead, his ragged coat flapping behind him like feathers. Walking, always walking, pausing only to see the annihilation, through the long darkness towards some weak light far in the distance where he will exit, leaving only smoking remains. Surely, Satan himself is come among us.

But some were not so bleak:

When the Crowman returns to our land you will know that the dark times are at an end. For he will spread his wings across this nation and draw away the black veil that has covered it for so long. It will be a cleansing. It will be death and rebirth. Pray for his swift arrival that we may be delivered. Pray for the coming of the Crowman that we may be, at last, transformed.