Advent (39 page)

 
He didn’t hit the switch.

 
He listened.

 
He thought perhaps there were five or six different voices. It was impossible to be sure.

 
He did, however, know for sure where they were coming from.

 
He pushed the door from the kitchen wide open, letting more of the nightlight’s glow into the room.

 
The faces around the walls were drained of colour, reduced to eerie lumps of darkness. The fact that he couldn’t see their eyes made all the difference. He could feel them watching him anyway, but it wasn’t quite as bad. He could concentrate on their voices instead.

 
The sounds floated distinctly around him like currents of air. The masks were muttering or chanting or whispering to themselves, or perhaps to someone else, another presence he couldn’t see.

 
Edging behind one sofa, the row of shadow shapes arrayed on the wall in front of him, he reached his hands out, carefully.

 
Creepy to look at, the masks were wonderful to touch. His fingers felt lines and volumes, the textures of different materials, curves made by mould or knife, precise or rough.
Sculpture’s a tactile medium
, their art teacher was always saying. Some of the masks were intricate and elaborate. Others seemed to be constructed out of just a few shapes, coherent like stones. Without him really thinking about it, his fingers felt their way along the row, wondering where the voices came from, looking for a match between shape and sound.

 
He knew instantly when he found it. It was like an electric shock in his hands. The voice flowed up through them and into him, inside him, filling him.

 
It knew him.

 
He jerked his hands away.

 
The mask he’d touched was a big wooden one, jutting out from the wall as if the bow of a model boat had crashed into Hester’s house. He was still close to the kitchen door, so a smudge of ghostly light fell across it, picking out its crude strong lines, the blunt ovals of its eyes.

 
. . . four or five of my menagerie are totemic objects of one sort or another. Not exactly museum quality, but the real thing.

 
The weird chorus drifted around him. One particular voice definitely seemed closer now, as though a mouth had turned to him directly. Deep, rich, hollow, heard as if through water.

 
Don’t be afraid
, said another voice, behind him, in the back of his thoughts.

 
Gav extended his hand again and rested it on the long wooden head.

 
The voice sang

hunger, solitude, freedom. It sang the blue light above and the black deep below, the salt currents channelling between clefts of rock to coasts and shallows where forests of mossy hemlock reached over the water’s edge, gathering rain. It hymned fat meat at the surface and swells of food scattering below. Blood and sustenance. It sang its name, a word there had never been an alphabet for

 
ma’chinu’ch

Gav pulled his hands back, reeling, the world spinning around him. The song went on, following its ancient course, but now it was outside him, as if by removing his fingers he’d closed a door on it. It had turned back into mere sound. The language, the meaning, was gone.

 
He breathed deeply, tempted for a moment to sink back into that ocean of joyful hunger. He heard the senseless syllables whispering distantly,
ma’chinu’ch,
ma’chinu’ch
. Where, he wondered, were the other voices? He edged along the wall towards the shuttered window, touching very gingerly, ready to jump his fingers away.

 
Part of him wanted to go back to bed. The sensible thing to do, it said, would be to close all the doors, go back upstairs, bury his head under the blankets and wait until he got to sleep, no matter how long it took, leaving the inscrutable presences to carry on their mumblings undisturbed. It might be hours. Wait until dawn, if he had to.

 
Another part listened to the otherworldly sounds and told him not to be afraid.

 
His fingers found a snout of rough wood and twitched again, and his heart jumped. Another voice found him, coming alive, a chthonic mutter tinged with a ferocity that made him pull his hand away almost at once. With that momentary touch something that prowled and pursued had turned to face him. Gav breathed hard, his fingertips still tingling. He peered towards the mask, trying to make out its features in the near-dark. It was the last in the row, furthest from the dim light coming through the kitchen door, and all he could see was the rough shape: a triangular shadow with a thrusting muzzle, slightly open. Parted jaws. Its guttural tuneless chant separated itself from the blended whispers and seemed to circle him.

 
Ducking closer, his left hand nudged the slatted blind at the window. It wobbled, exposing a crack of cold white from the streetlight in the road outside.

 
Gav felt around for the cord of the blind. Should have thought of that before, he told himself, relieved beyond any obvious reason. His idea was to open the slats of the blind just a tiny bit, letting in as much of the outside light as he needed to see the mask while leaving the rest of the room safely obscure. He’d close them again before he went back to bed. Hester obviously didn’t want anyone looking in on her.

 
He found the cord and tugged carefully. The slats swivelled apart. He peered out, looking for the single lamp-post in the lane.

 
There beneath it, as still as if she had taken root in the road, her shadowed face raised towards him, was Miss Grey.

Part IV

Night

Seventeen

A January night 1537, and another night

Within the still
water in the silver bowl, a room appeared. A painted, firelit room, squat columns vanishing up through smoke to an unseen roof. The hiss and spit of the fire and the sound of a chanting voice came very distantly and obscurely, like noises underwater. As the scene grew clearer and a group of white-and-scarlet robed figures became visible between the columns, the magus caught his breath. Bending over the bowl, reflected firelight shone in his eyes.

 
‘They assemble for a rite,’ said an invisible voice, a susurrus of dead leaves. The greatest magus in the world stared into the bowl, transfixed.

 
‘Is that truly Ilium?’

 
‘We show you what you bid us show, Magister. Obedient always.’

 
The robed figures moved blurrily, like actors in a dream. He saw their barbarous faces. Narrow, strong-jawed, dark in the oily firelight.

 
‘Shall we conduct you there? Then you may sate your eyes on the woman as you please.’

 
His breath caught in his chest. The most beautiful woman in the world, that was what he had commanded the spirit to show him. An idle thought, a whim. He had never imagined it would throw the doors of time open so wide. A mere trick of clairvoyance, and it had led him to this: the brink of legend. Helen. Helen of Troy.

 
But then, he reflected, it was testimony to the immensity of his power of command. He was almost ashamed of how unworthy the original impulse had been, how easily and lightly he could make marvels possible.

 
‘That is the royal household?’

 
‘We know nothing of men, Magister. We do your bidding merely.’

 
‘Then show me the woman.’ His eyes hadn’t wavered from the obscure scene, not for an instant.

 
‘We must approach.’

 
‘You will conduct me back?’

 
‘As you wish.’

 
‘It is a great distance,’ he said. ‘Far greater than any we have spanned before.’

 
‘Do you doubt us?’

 
‘No.’

 
‘Do you fear for yourself?’

 
‘I?’ He shook his head. ‘What have I to fear?’

 
‘There are old powers, Magister. Beware them.’

 
He laughed shortly, still without looking up. ‘You waste your warnings on me, spirit. I conjure with powers little less than angels. Conduct me now.’

 
‘That is your command?’ The voice with its hundred dry echoes seemed to swell with subtle triumph, but the magus, heart pounding, did not notice.

 
‘Yes. I desire it. Now.’

 
The blurred shadows at the edges of the water’s surface rippled and spilled out. The firelight burned brighter, tinged with coppery green; at the same moment the magus was overwhelmed by a rich, astringent savour of Asiatic smoke. It swamped him as the shadows did. He felt himself floating in them, dizzy, light enough to be spun on the currents of scented air. When he came to rest, he was there, in the room where the priest wailed and poured oil into the fire while the king and his family attended. Although his mortal body had not moved from his laboratory in the cellars of his house, the ghost of that body turned its head towards the gathering of men and women.

 
‘In the second rank, Magister,’ whispered the possessor of the dry voice, who now appeared as a phantom of flickering burning light in the shape of a naked and sexless human.

 
But the magus did not need to be told. As soon as his bodiless gaze had fallen on the slender-necked girl standing just behind the queen, he had known her. Her exquisite head was tilted demurely down in honour of the goddess, whose crude bronze image glowed dully from its sooty niche. But there was an assurance in her sly eyes and her settled, faintly smiling lips, which showed all too clearly how well she knew her own unrivalled beauty, and foretold how she would continue to exult in her loveliness even when it had brought years of misery to all the rest of those standing with her in the shrine that night, even when it had brought destruction to the shrine itself, and fiery ruin to the city that housed it. Helen. Her name, after all, meant
torch
.

 
‘Fix your eyes on her. Feed them.’ The magus scarcely heard his companion’s urgings. Dissolved in wonder, he scanned the smoky room, the rough faces, names destined to live for incalculable centuries, outlasting nations and empires, outlasting even the stone of their own tombs.

 
‘There is peril for you elsewhere,’ the burning spirit warned, a sly whisper. The magus gave it no more attention than one ghost gives another.

 
‘Deadly peril,’ it added. On its blank face, under the lidless and pupilless eyes, a strange smile spread. The magus never saw it. His attention had been distracted by a pair of eyes pointed, unexpectedly, in his direction. They were a little further back from the group, at its edge. They were not roving idly, or watching the goddess dutifully, as all the others were.

 
They were fixed on him.

 
He returned the look.

 
The phantom of naked silent flame whispered a single word:                                ‘Lost.’

 
Its serpentine hiss went unnoticed. The eyes belonged to a woman who was staring at the corner where the two ghosts were. Horror spread over her face.

 
There was a dreadful scream. The room surged with sound and motion, men’s barbarous voices raised in anger. Amid the commotion the magus studied the one who had seen him and saw him still, judging by the unmistakable focus of her fear. A young woman, with a hunted expression and dark hair that was as disordered as all the others’ was oiled and fine. Shrinking backwards, she raised an arm, pointed directly at him and screamed again above the clamour, in a powerful voice rich with dreadful conviction, and went on screaming until someone struck her mouth. She went spinning to the floor. Dark blood smeared over the back of her hand. Tangled hair fell like a half-closed curtain in front of her eyes; she clutched at it. Her jaw shook as if resisting the torture of speech. The tormentor was too strong: her back arched, the sinews of her neck sprung tight as a viol’s strings.