Heaven's Bones (9 page)

He was reaching for the fissured bark of the oak when he heard the dog bark.

He turned, ready to scramble up the tree, bees or no, if necessary. He didn't like dogs; in his experience, they bit.

It was a fierce-looking thing coming at him through the grass, part mastiff at the least, with its huge head and black as Satan. It barked again and he braced himself, but it stopped a few yards away and watched him, considering. Again it barked and it seemed almost an invitation to come and run in the dappled sunshine, and then it lowered its head and snuffled its way right to him, until he was backed up against the tree with the creature slobbering on his boots.

Tentatively he reached out and scratched it between the ears. It sat down with a satisfied grunt, its red tongue hanging from the side of its mouth.

“Mala!”

The dog turned toward the voice and woofed again, and Alistair saw a man standing there between the oaks. He wore a dark jacket, a bit like a topcoat, with a rich green shirt underneath, and leaned on a stout staff that would work equally well as a weapon or as a walking stick.

“Come away, Mala. Leave the boy alone.” There was the slightest touch of an accent in his vowels, nothing Alistair was familiar with.

The dog grumbled, but rose and padded toward the man. Halfway to him, it paused and glanced back at Alistair.

A sudden impulse came over him. “He was no trouble, sir,” he called.

The man raised his bushy eyebrows. “A bitch, she is, and a passel of trouble, for all she's a good watchdog.” He gave Mala a hearty pat on the back. “But it's kind of you to say so.”

Alistair was shy of strangers, and didn't make friends easily. But he felt no fear of the man as he approached the oak, Mala at his side. Perhaps it was that the man's demeanor was casual and he didn't fuss. It didn't seem to matter that Alistair was a child, and far from anywhere he had any business being.

It was as if Alistair belonged here as much as the bees, or the grass, or the dog who panted at her master's foot.

The man wasn't much taller than Alistair, but he was very burly through the shoulders, and strong-looking for all he was well past middle age. He stood beside the boy and looked up at the branches of the oak, as if he could pierce the canopy of leaves with his gaze.

“A new swarm, making a new hive,” he said, reflectively. “They ain't in a mood to sting now, but give them an hour or three, and then they'll have something to get angry about. You'd better come away now, while they're still in a mood to let you go scot-free.”

He turned and strode away, leaving Alistair confused. Was the man warning him off his land? He hadn't meant to trespass.

The hum of the bees was growing more intense, more purposed, he realized. Perhaps it was time to go home and risk the consequences.

Then the man turned and called over his shoulder.

“It's getting on to dinnertime, boy,” he called. “If you've not eaten, come join us.”

Dinnertime? Alistair's family didn't dine so early, but suddenly a rumble in his belly reminded him he'd had no lunch, and for breakfast only an apple filched from the larder.

He followed the man and the dog a few steps. “If it's no trouble,” he called, wondering where his boldness came from.

In response, the man waved his arm, almost impatiently. Alistair trotted after him until he caught up. The man barely glanced at him, accepting his presence as if he were another dog, and Alistair tentatively laid his hand on Mala's great back for reassurance.

Along they went, through oak and meadow, and in that place where the trees and sky and small blue flowers in the grass, and the thump of the man's stick against the ground, and the warm solidity of the dog's flesh beneath his fingers was almost too real, he felt a great upwelling inside him, a river of happiness to match the chuckling waterway behind him, ready to break free. It did not break its floodgates but stayed, trembling inside him, and he didn't dare speak for fear he would babble.

The man would understand, he knew.

He didn't know how long they walked, but his pangs of hunger were sharpening when they came to a clearing and the dog's muscles under his hand tensed. Alistair stopped, wondering if what he saw was real.

They were pulled up alongside a grove of birch that clustered together like a pale green jewel in the golden band of oak: two wagons—gypsy caravans—one a deep forest green, the other the cheerful red of a cardinal's wing. Their sides were heavily carved with fantastic patterns and the details picked out in gold. Two enormous draft horses grazed a little way apart—a bay with a dark mane that ignored him and kept rooting at the sweet grass, and a coal black creature without a trace of white who lifted its great head and stared at him, considering. Then it snorted and returned to its grazing.

In the center of the clearing, before the wagons, was a fire banked with round stones and over it a tripod with a stewpot. Alistair sniffed and his hunger overwhelmed him all at once, as if he had been starving all his life.

“What have you brought us, Nicolae?”

A woman stood at the edge of the clearing, her arms full of kindling. A little girl stood beside her, similarly burdened. The woman was in her forties, perhaps—a little older than his mother—but although her face was tanned and lined there was a peaceful joy to it that he had never seen in his mother's face, and it gave her an air
of youth and vitality. She wore a full dark skirt and a shawl over her head, but a quantity of thick gray hair peeped out.

The little girl was maybe five or six, small with a serious expression.

Nicolae walked over to the stewpot and considered its contents.

“Enough to share,” he commented.

“Of course,” said the woman in her deep voice, quiet but penetrating. Followed by the girl, she walked to the rearmost wagon, the green one, and placed her wood on a pile behind it. “There always is.”

The stew was lamb: delicious, and followed by hot tea with a bite to it like mint, and as Nicolae sat with him and carved at the top of his walking stick with a short knife they talked about the river, how it linked the small towns of Alabama like beads on a string necklace, and the animals they'd seen, and all manner of inconsequential things that afterward Alistair would try hard to remember, knowing that somewhere inside Nicolae's innocuous words there was some nugget, some clue that was of immense importance.

The woman's name was Tariel, and when he asked after the girl's name she smiled and stroked the girl's blonde hair. The girl looked at him unblinking, with dark eyes, incongruous with the rest of her coloring.

“She hasn't told us her name yet,” was all Tariel would say.

The girl sat nearby, listening to Alistair and Nicolae's conversation. When Tariel gave her a close-woven basket, telling her to find berries, she pulled Alistair by the hand until he followed her between the birches, across a patch of meadow to a shady bower where blackberries clustered, swollen and dusky purple, thick and close to the ground. They filled the basket, staining their fingers and scratching their arms on the brambles.

All the time she never spoke to him, but after a while she did begin to smile.

Long afterward Alistair would remember bringing the berries to Tariel, and eating something thick and sweet that he'd never had before, and sitting on the bay horse as it paced the paths of the meadowlands. Perhaps once he slept, because he could remember Nicolae and Tariel speaking nearby, their words drifting like silt through the wide-meshed net of his drowsing.

“Do you see anything?” Nicolae's voice was husky, and a little sad.

“Only what you know already,” replied Tariel. “Only what we both know about the Children of Jaelle.”

“So it's true, then? Her seed scatters further than I'd guessed.”

“It's the nature of the Vistani to wander.”

“He hasn't the Sight.”

“Nor Curse neither. But he holds inside him the capacity for great good and great evil, like two halves of a ripening peach, and an empty space inside where the pit once was. I can't tell which will stay and which will wither away. It won't be an ordinary life.”

“Shall we take him, then?”

In his half-dream, Alistair stirred, fear and joy threading through him:
Take me! Take me
Home.

“You know we are not permitted.”

Alistair must have awakened, because Nicolae was standing before him, his expression at once stern and kind.

“You must return to your family, boy, and the day is growing old.” It was true; the shadows were creeping across the ground and the sun was low and swollen-red.

Alistair said good-bye to Tariel and nodded at the silent girl, and Nicolae and Mala walked him back to the bee-tree, where the hive was settling down and humming drowsily. It felt like a curtain slowly closing across the last, tantalizingly incomplete final scene of a play he didn't want to end.

“Can you find your own way back? Just keep left of the river, and right at the triple-trunk oak.”

Alistair nodded, too overcome to say anything more.

He was well on his way before he wondered how Nicolae knew the way he should take to get home.

He half-turned, but in the darkening twilight all he could see under the honey-oak was the dog, Mala, who stared after him. Then even the dog looked away, as if someone was calling her, and then she was gone.

Sometimes, after the Fire, when Alistair Weldon left the confines of the house and the whispering of unseen attendants and walked beside the river, he saw the shimmer of pollen or heard the humming of a bee and thought that it might happen again—that the smell of dried honey would lead him to a gnarled oak, and a black dog would be waiting for him, and a silent girl would be standing with a stained bowl full of berries.

He'd think of Nicholae's words, and the secret he know lay inside them, loosely concealed, as if the gypsy had wanted him to figure out the secret. Of what? Of the Children of Jaelle, whoever they might be? If he could puzzle out the secret, even now, buried between the tangled threads of childhood memory, if he could tease it out and hold it to the light, would Nicholae, and the woman, the girl, the dog—would they emerge from the woods and take him with them that elusive place he still, to this day, longed for, however hidden, however unseen?

But then the golden moment would dissipate, like smoke, like ashes in the water, and he saw himself walking away, back to his life of chaos, and the choices he made, one by one, and the desires he fed, all to fill up
that empty space
, isn't that what she called it?
The hole where the pit once was
.

They are beginning to come to me.

For a moment I thought it was one of my sisters, creeping down the wide steps to find me, to take me home. But this was my home now, the forgotten chambers and corridors under London, and I could imagine no other.

Her worn shoes clanged against the iron stairs. She paused and peered around a pillar, blinking in the bad light and the smoke from my fire in its salvaged steel pan.

I sat with my back to the rough sandstone wall, so she couldn't see my twisted wings. Her shawl was draped decorously over her hair; she had the air of a temple suppliant about her, come to ask the Oracle her fate.

I wondered if she would ask me that ancient question:
What do you want?

And I wondered if I'd answer, like the Sybil:
I want to die
.

But when she opened her mouth the illusion was lost; her accent was pure and uncouth and told of the East End I once knew so well.

“Your pardon, I'm sure, miss,” she said, twisting her fingers in her skirt. “But they say, up there—”

She glanced at the roof of my chamber, where a crude grate showed a wavering light where people walked on the platform far overhead, and the faint sound of the trains leaked through. She
must have been very brave, or desperate, to come this far down. I wondered if she had any comprehension that this room had once been a plague pit, and that the bubo-swollen bodies of men, women, and children had lolled where she stood now. If I closed my eyes I could hear the dull thump and crack of their bodies being tossed, one by one, from above, so I kept them open.

She swallowed and continued, quicker now. “They say that you know things, miss, and sometimes will tell. And I want to know …”

“About the baby.” I interrupted because I was tired and hadn't the patience for her story. I'd seen it, so why make her explain? Still, her lips twisted in dissatisfaction. She had practiced the telling all the way here.

The baby lay, still and unresponsive, its colorless eyes glazed open. Occasionally it moved and a thin string of saliva trailed from the corner of its mouth. It was wrapped in a swaddle made clean as possible and lay in a basket on the floor. A girl of about eleven kneeled beside it, anxiously keeping watch. Her skirts were much-mended and too short for her, and her knees were scuffed. She held a rag soaked in watered milk at the corner of the baby's mouth letting one drop at a time trickle in
.