The House of Storms (64 page)

Me?

‘Who else could I mean? I know, I know, that Marion Price is supposed to have died. But she could be resurrected again. It would add to your … glamour. People would listen to you, Marion, in a way that they will never ever listen to the likes of me.’

I’m not Marion.

Who are you, then ?

It would be all too easy to think some vague answer which Klade would understand far better than she did herself. But she cleared her throat. ‘That’s the one thing I never expect to find out.’

A deep gush of laughter registered within her. ‘You’re right.’
How could I disagree …
‘And perhaps this work was never meant for you. Perhaps someone else deserves a chance.’

What a shame we no longer have the Beetle Lady …

Or the ravener …

Or the balehound …

Or Ida, who was once so dear to me …

‘I love you, Klade. You know that, don’t you?’

The rocky head moved a little. The huge mineral hands lay upon her, although they remained light as ghosts. Her Bonny Boy truly had grown.
I love you, too.
‘But I’ll never grow tired of hearing that phrase.’

‘Neither will I.’

Marion looked around her. The room had a damp, homely smell. It reminded her a little of the old cottage at Clyst, and also of the fading days of Invercombe.

‘So … What do you plan to do now?’

It was Klade’s turn to hesitate. ‘I suppose that first we must entrench. I hate to use military terms, but I fear they will always be appropriate in the world of men. People will never trust us, and we will always be half the bogey-man, half an unwanted answer to their prayers. It wasn’t us who destroyed the old guilds. They did that themselves by splitting into territorial loyalties during the Civil War. Once people knew that town and family came before guild, it could never be the same. But at least now we Chosen can begin to define what is ours. I’ve done a little research. One of our kind also played a pivotal role at the end of the last Age. Her name was Anna Winters, and she founded the place which came to be known as Einfell where I was raised. But she could have done much more. There were moments when she held the balance of power, and she chose to let it slip. She didn’t want to be what she was, and I cannot believe that that way ever leads to happiness. At least I made a conscious choice, and I am glad I did. As for Einfell, it was never that old village, or even some fairy myth. The Beetle Lady was right. The place we were seeking lay beyond even Invercombe, and now that’s gone as well…’

‘Some people are calling this Einfell.’

‘This is just another building. The truth is always elsewhere. And the real Einfell isn’t somewhere you can stand in.’
Not, at least, in the flesh you’re wearing, Mother. It lies there …

Klade gestured, and Marion saw that a mirror hung in what had previously been the furthest, dimmest corner of this long room. It remained dark for a moment, then brightened, and the reflection of a beautiful young woman, scarcely more than a girl, smiled out at them as she combed her lustrous ebony hair.

‘What’s it like to be in there?’

I don’t know. That’s one step even I can’t yet fully make.

Drawing whatever presence they had seen back into unimaginable matrices of the reckoning engines, the mirror faded to black. Outside, in a lesser fading, Marion saw that clouds were coming in over Bristol on a freshening breeze.

‘I need to go now. I’m sorry—’

Don’t be sorry. Not for anything.

She smiled. ‘Then I’m not.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘I’m still not quite sure. But I nearly am.’

‘That’s good. And you’ll keep in touch?’

Klade’s hand, his whole heavy arm, reached towards her, and she clasped it, and raised it to her face, and stroked it, and kissed it, and tasted tidal rock, and salt.

Always.

Then the dream shifted, and she was outside, and walking briskly towards her lodgings. The old silos and sugar warehouses were still partly abandoned, but the small new shoots of lesser buildings and stills and mashing houses were starting to rise from their ruins. Prices of the small amounts of sugar which were starting to arrive from the Fortunate Isles were still exorbitant, especially as the East’s beloved bittersweet had proved impossible to grow without the endless nurturing of spells. Some said the demand would never return—after all, people had lived for years with little enough sweetness in their lives—but, thinking of Denise, Marion rather suspected that it would.

Sunshine Lodge still smelled and felt pretty much the same. There, in room 12A, she stuffed her few belongings into an old canvas bag and signed herself out in the book which the woman in the hairnet presented to her. M. Price with a slur on the M, so it could have been a W or an N or a U—or perhaps even an S. For Marion was dead, and Price was a common enough name. And who wanted to think about the past? As she walked towards the docks, she decided that how she lived from now on would be a far better memorial for her lost and joyful sister than anything a stonemason would ever be able to create. For Sally had loved and laughed unthinkingly and unselflessly, and the old, fading Marion was determined she would try to live her life in the same way. She would sleep when she slept and wake when she woke, and cry when she felt like crying. She would learn how to laugh as well. Even thinking those thoughts made her step quicken, and she smiled up at the sky, and chuckled out loud, and nearly fell over a bundle of ropes.

‘Why … If it isn’t the Price girl!’

Turning, Marion saw that a large black woman was sharing a bench with a pair of gulls. Her hair was a ball of white now, and her features had puffed and thinned a little, but she was still recognisably Cissy Dunning. Marion sat down beside her in place of the rising, complaining gulls.

‘The Price girl,’ Marion said. ‘Is that really how you still think of me?’

Cissy smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe all the things I’ve heard about you since. Thinking you’re still the way you were back in that summer at Invercombe is part of what’s kept me sane.’

‘You look well.’

‘You mean old—you might as well go on and say it.’

‘In that case, Cissy, you can say it about me as well…’

The two women laughed, and for those who walked past along the docks, their manner and conversation would have seemed no more than what it was: two women, one black, one white, one entering middle age and the other leaving it, catching up on old times just as many Bristolians now did. At least Cissy was alive, and had managed to get by since leaving Invercombe. Alice Meynell, as good as her word, had allowed her to find further work in other houses, and then war had intervened, and her skills in organising food and accommodation had been in even more demand.

‘Before then, I’d thought my job was looking after houses. But I discovered it was people I’d always been taking care of, although it was a hard enough way to have to learn. Houses fall…’ She nodded back in the direction of the extraordinary new spires of the House of the Chosen. ‘Even the biggest.’

Cissy said she’d have retired by now if her guild had honoured her pension. The way things were, though, she still had to work. And she often thought about Invercombe. Yes, she’d been there, or to the space of onrushing sea which was mostly all that remained now. She’d even heard the stories the mariners and the shorefolk were telling, and laughed at their wildness. Invercombe never had been some fairy palace. The only ghosts which had ever haunted it were the ones people saw in their own heads. No, what she missed was the real place, the cools of its corridors and the gleams of its windows and soft warmth of its gardens and the laughter of its busy maids. And Weatherman Ayres—she missed him as well, and missed the life they’d planned to lead, although he’d have been off on some Western frigate at the first sign of war, stubborn man that he’d been. Most likely, she’d probably still be sitting on this same bench, and still without a proper pension, and still grieving for him, and wondering how long she’d manage to keep bending with
her
hips.

‘You’ve never thought of going back to the Fortunate Isles?’

Cissy wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s
another
place I go to in my thoughts. Me and Weatherman Ayres often walk those white sands. But the real islands, from all I hear, are in as big a mess as we are here. Sure, they’ve abolished what the East still likes to call slavery. But there’s less work to be done, and less pay, which makes for harder living by any arithmetic. People talk about
England
over in the Fortunate Isles the way we used to talk about them over there. Those ships you see leaving won’t just be coming back with cane. There’ll be more and more people with my colour skin heading for England, and we won’t be content with just sweeping the streets to see where all the gold’s gone that was supposed to be hidden underneath.’

‘It’ll be good for the country.’

‘Ha! You try telling that to the average guildsman. Stealing jobs—I’ve heard it already. And then there’s this new damn fool theory—if you read the papers, you may have heard it—that we’re all risen from apes instead of being the Elder’s good creations, and all life’s about is who kicks the strongest. And there’s meetings where they’ll tell you that the likes of us African people are a whole lot nearer cousins to the apes than you whites.’

‘That isn’t—’

‘No, no,’ Cissy insisted, either stubbornly or wilfully misinterpreting the objection. ‘It’s true. The posters are everywhere. Look.’ She nodded towards a wall behind them. ‘There’s one over there.’

The two women fell silent. It had, after all, been a long time.

‘Well…’ By shuffles and rises, Cissy made to stand. ‘This won’t get things seen to.’

Helping her, Marion took her hands, and Cissy swayed for a moment, catching her breath. ‘You’d have made a good steward, you know. Such a waste …’ Chuckling to herself, shaking her head, she turned and waddled off on her failing hips.

It was early afternoon, and the docks were busy, departures and loadings hurrying to make the most of the prevailing winds and tide. Sails boomed, ropes slithered, cargoes rolled, but still it seemed strangely silent without the accompanying smoky rush of endless engines. The ships which had bravely forgone sail entirely were now being dismantled for their ores in the breakers’ yards, although there were, Marion noticed as she walked on, a few loud and leaky vessels which ran on engines entirely devoid of the strengthenings of aether. Klade was right; the less the Chosen helped, the more humanity would prosper.

There was no doubt that trade had shrunk. Offers for deckhands, which had once been chalked on blackboards beside gangplanks, were now scarce. Berths were rare as well, for the big passenger vessels that had limped back into port generally hadn’t limped out again, and people were as anxious to leave England as they ever had been, despite what Cissy said. Beyond the loading runs and slipways, where the old smells of bilge and molasses still prevailed, leaned many unwanted and often drastically unseaworthy vessels, some of which, in what looked like a vain hope, had drippingly painted signs on their hulls offering them for sale. One particular vessel took her attention. It was small, and turned the tip of its single high mast in seemingly impatient figure-eights as the tide snaked around it.

She found the unemployed mariner who claimed to be its owner playing cards in an old shed nearby. Negotiations were swift. Marion was certain she’d got no bargain, and even wondered if she wasn’t conspiring in theft, but at least she knew enough mariners’ phrases to keep the old man on his toes. The deal was done. They spat on their palms, shook hands. Heading back to her vessel after buying water and supplies, Marion found him checking ropes and rusty fixings and muttering spells which no longer worked. But the little ship seemed seaworthy, and they both agreed that its main liability was the weathertop which, stained with acids and rusts and engine ice, sat uselessly in the middle of the deck. After some work with a spanner, and much wrenching and splintering, they had the thing loose and set it rolling across the deck. Trundling overboard, it vanished with a large splash.

Marion pulled out at mid-afternoon with a few other last vessels on the departing tide along the Avon Cut. Bells clanged. Shouts were exchanged. Then through the open locks, and the deeper currents beyond Avonmouth, and the stronger pull of the winds, and all Bristol shrank. She could sense the keel seeking direction, she could feel the rudder’s need. This was where the Severn and the tides of the channel met amid changing scents and dimpled water. Sea or river? But the vessel was a far more capable craft than the cabin boat she had once navigated down from Bewdley, and she let its prow surge south and west towards the widening estuary. On one side lay Wales, those towns and mountains she had still never visited, and on the other the hills of the West rolled green and verdant under breezy flickers of sunlight. The Severn Bridge still hung entire across the quickening currents, a frozen spell, even if it no longer glowed at night. There was talk that it would be reopened to traffic by this summer, although men would have to learn how to climb and paint its gantries in place of the gargoyles the ailing Guild of Beastmasters was not able to create. Like many such structures, it was more strongly built than its designers had ever been allowed to credit. Funnily enough, Marion thought, considering how everything now depended on unavoidable physics, life was still all a matter of belief.

Beyond here, although there were many banks and buoys to navigate, and land still enclosed the Bristol Channel’s horizons, Marion was unmistakably at sail on the sea. She tacked, and the prow bobbed and cut, and the boom swung over the deepening waves. There was much flotsam about from the storms of last winter, both natural and man-made, and huge brown islands of weed glowed as they decayed with an eerie phosphorescence which had nothing to do with magic. Marion could feel, smell, that it would be a good year for the shorefolk.

Now, as the currents turned boisterous, and just when the coastline to her left should have been most familiar to her, it grew strange. Clarence Cove had widened, and all that was left of Durnock Head was a white-tipped crashing of waves. Hauling in the rudder, Marion steered as close as she dared. The huge new cliffs were rougher and more sheer, but there was little else left to show where Invercombe had once stood, for even the wider outreaches of the edges of its estate had slipped and changed. Still, peering down over the side as she checked for obstructions and her vessel danced over the waves, she was sure for a moment that she saw pathways down there amid the wavering marine life, and gesturing statues, and the golden glow of a weathertop, and the flashing tall windows of the house which she still visited often in her dreams. But the seabirds feeding their offspring on this season’s new bounty swooped wildly about her in agitated screams, and these waters were unmapped, and dangerously unbuoyed. Tilting the rudder, loosening the sail, she headed back towards deeper waters. South, and west.