by Paul Kearney
There is a silence. I am barely even aware of the wind outside now, so strange and enormous is the knowledge I have uncovered. Fairytales are true. The wolf is big and bad and I am talking to him right here and now. I start to shiver again. There are so many things I want to know that they crowd out my mouth.
‘Just let me stay here a while, is all I ask. I’ll be no trouble,’ Luca says.
‘Where is Queenie, and Jaelle and the rest? Are they here in the city now?’
He stares at me a moment, and then shakes his head. ‘I’m on my own.’ He runs his tongue over his teeth again, as though they are strange and new to him. ‘I came down to... to the river, and they caught me there and sought to make an end of me, so I ran any ways I could, and ended up crossing the railway and the canal both, and they was close on my heels so I took to the rooftops. And I knew where you live, see, and… I knew the skylight was open. And in I climbed.’
‘And in you climbed,’ I say, amazed. I think of the shouting in the street Pa and I heard earlier.
‘You wouldn’t have a bite to eat on you by any chance?’ Luca asks. ‘I’m fair famished.’
‘Don’t you eat sheep and lambs and things when you’re the wolf?’
‘Ain’t no lambs near here, girl.’
‘We have bread and cheese, and tea,’ I say.
‘Can you bring me some? When you changes back, it fair takes it out of you. I feel as though my belly is cleaving to my backbone.’
I wonder what time it is, and think of all the long stairs down to the basement kitchen.
‘You are a nuisance,’ I say to him.
‘I’m right sorry for that. I just need to rest up a while, and see out the night. The Roadmen are still out there somewheres, and I ain’t no match for ’em when I’m like this.’
‘All right then. But don’t make a noise. It will take me a while.’
‘Much obliged, Anna.’
I turn to go, pleased to hear him say my name, but as I do something occurs to me.
‘Have you been here before?’ I am thinking of the peculiar smell the attic has always had, and the open skylight.
‘Not me,’ Luca says. ‘Not lately.’
‘Huumph,’ I say, and take the candle. ‘You’ll be in the dark.’
‘Bless you, girl, I got no fear of the dark.’
Of course he hasn’t. Because he is the fear in the dark, the monster under the bed. Luca is a thing out of stories, and he is here in my house wearing my coat. If that is not an adventure then I do not know what is.
THE WIND HIDES my footsteps on the stairs, and there is no longer anything to fear in the shadows beyond the candlelight. I grab a blanket off my bed, slip on my wet shoes, and in the basement I fold a loaf and a wedge of cheddar into the blanket and fill a jug of water. What with the food, the jug, the candle, and Pie, I am fairly warm and bothered by the time I climb back up into the attic again, and I am gone so long I wonder if Luca will be gone too by the time I get back, and if the attic will be its old self again, empty of marvels, and I will wake up from a sleepwalk with the night black and stormy and normal.
But he is still there. I catch his eye at the back of the attic, that green-yellow gleam which is so unnerving. I am perfectly composed however as I wrap myself in the blanket and set out the food for him.
He crawls forward – his face is swelling fast – and we sit cross legged with the candle and the jug between us while he gnaws on the cheese and bites off chunks of yesterday’s loaf.
He looks up, mouth full, still chewing, and mutters ‘Thankee kindly,’ as I watch him eat. When he drinks from the jug the water trickles down over his chin and he is as noisy as a dog lapping from its bowl.
‘Now you have to answer my questions,’ I tell him.
There is blood on the cheese as he sets it down in the dust, and his face is black with it, smeared like jam.
‘You sure you wants to know what I have to tell?’ He asks. ‘Could be you’d sleep better knowing nothing.’
‘That’s for me to decide,’ I tell him.
He rubs his mouth. ‘Awright then. Ask away.’
‘Who are the Roadmen?’
He frowns, and for a second his face turns ugly. ‘They’s our enemies. Not all the time, but mostly. They wanders the country like we do, but they ain’t kin to one another like we are. They got Chapters in every town in Albion and Albu, and in old Erui too, as well as in Gaul across the sea.
‘They’s wandering men mostly – tramps – but they ain’t your average beggar. The Roadmen have been walking all the long and narrow ways of the world since the Great Stones was raised. They danced to the sun before the coming of the Christ-man, and on Midsummer’s eve they dance to it still. I’ve heard ’em called many things. Queenie reckons they was the same manner of folk as us once, long ages ago. Druids, witches, or whatever you care to name it.
‘Now we walk the same roads – but me and mine, we dance to the moon, and this time o’ year is ours – same as Midsummer is their time for feasting and whatnot. We is like two sides of a coin. They are the light; we’s the shadow.’
‘And they are hunting you.’
‘They hunts us when they take a mind to, and when they have the numbers. It takes some sand to chase a skinchanger under the moon, and blood is spilled more often than not.’
‘What about Fat Bert and his friends?’
Luca drops his eyes and pushes the cheese through the dust with his fingertip.
‘They was just regular tramps. I was travelling with them a while, to meet up with the family. I been walking alone all over the old country in the west, but we tries to gather together for the Long Night.
‘I should be with them now, up in the woods. No Roadman will go near a forest this night. But they caught me in the open, by running water where we is weakest, and so they laid chase on me, and steered me from the woods to the city. They are strong here. This is an old place o’ theirn.
‘You make them sound like some kind of secret society.’
‘That they are. In ages gone by they ruled the land, and the people in it. It was the Roadmen who carved the white horse on the hills, for the horse is their beast as the wolf is ourn. Wayland was their king, back in the time before time. It was he as first made the black iron, and they used that against us. They carry mistletoe, and hawthorn sprays too, and so ye shall know them. A mistletoe berry is sure poison to one of us.’
Something like a snarl flits across his face.
‘Tramps and gypsies – that’s what people call us all, but you folk got no idea of who we really is, or the ways o’ the Old World – not no more. The Roadmen, they was warriors and priests back when the land was young, and they do not forget that.’
He shrugs. ‘Queenie could tell you more of the history of it.’
‘She said you came from Egypt,’ I say, fascinated.
‘So we did. We was the black dog that watched over the kings. Our folk were the guards who kept the doors of the tombs. But when the Christ-man came into the world we was cast out, and went a wandering. And the doors stand open with no-one to watch over them now.
‘That’s what I was told as a nipper, anyways.’ Luca seems uncomfortable. ‘Like as not it’s all just story and such. But we are such as we are, and so are the Roadmen, and there ain’t no denying that.’ He looks at me. ‘Once you know all this, there ain’t no way to unknow it, girl. Queenie says you have the Old Blood in you, else I would not be telling you this, not for no hunk of bread and cheese leastways.’
‘The Old Blood?’
‘Our blood runs in many a one who don’t know it. Your folk is from the Old World; even I can see it in your face.’
I am rather pleased by this, as though I have suddenly found myself to be a character in a wondrous story. And here in the old attic on the longest night of the year, it does not seem fanciful at all. Not after I have seen a beast turn into a boy before my own eyes. Anything could be true now. Anything at all.
And I feel a
s though the world has suddenly grown much larger around me, full of mysteries I had not even guessed at. It is alarming and thrilling at the same time. Not like finding a Psammead in the sand, but nearly as good.
‘Are you all like this, all the Romani?’ I ask him.
‘Not likely!’ He snorts. ‘No. And we ain’t Romani – it’s just what we is called by those as knows no better. And as for skinchanging...’ He squirms a little. ‘There’s only a dwindling few as has the Black Change left in us. Job is another. It was he you saw that night I walked you out of the wood.
‘Some has it a little, and can hear the beasts speak and see in the dark and smell out the stink of life. But most are normal folk, not much different ’n you. The skinchangers walk alone, most of the year, but this is our night. Before I came east to the city, it had been nigh on five moons since I laid eyes on old Queenie.’ He lowers his eyes. ‘’Tis a lonesome life at times, tramping the roads, working here and there.
‘I’m good with beasts. I know the working of them. I can plough a furrow straight as a plumb-line, and swing a scythe with the best of them. But when the moon rises full, I got to move on.’
‘Why?’
‘’Tis hard to fight the Change, when the moon is up, when it’s full and sometimes when it’s new. I can come back from it, if I tries hard enough, but when it comes upon me, it’s like... ’ He colours and stops.
‘Like what?’
‘Like needing to piss. Like you are bursting full and there ain’t nothing you can do about it but let it out. There, now ain’t I genteel?’ He scowls.
‘I’m not some silly girl who will have a fit of giggles because you say the word piss,’ I tell him crossly. ‘Didn’t I just see your bare bum and... and the other bits, and I never said a word.’
‘Well…’ He gathers my coat more closely about his middle and looks down as if to check nothing is hanging out. ‘Well, there’s no decency to be had.’
‘Oh, stuff. So what do you want to do now? Will you change back into the wolf and jump out the skylight again?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m done with that until the sun sets again. Tain’t like turning on a tap.’ He rubs his eye. It is swelling shut.
‘Did they beat you badly?’ It occurs to me that Luca must be in pain. He keeps touching his bloody face and makes small, writhing twists with his shoulders.
‘They landed a few on me, I’ll not deny it. Hawthorn sticks. But I gave one a bite he’ll not forget.’
‘Does that –’ I dredge up memories of old stories. ‘Does that mean he’ll become like you, because you bit him?’
Luca snorts. ‘No. Doesn’t work like that. Truth to tell, I don’t know how it works, or how my kind are made to be. We just are.’
‘Would you eat someone, if you got the chance?’ I ask him, and I pull Pie close to my chest.
Luca grins. ‘Depends on how tasty they was.’
‘Now you’re making fun of me.’
‘Am I?’ Luca asks. His face sobers and he looks positively grim for a second. ‘Girlie, I am right grateful to you for taking me in and the grub and all, but you don’t want to be more deep in matters that are not your business than you have a need to be. None of the Roadmen saw me slip in here, and come dawn I’ll make sure none see me slip out, either.
‘If they think that a normal person is helping a skinchanger, they’ll not take it too well. This fight is supposed to be between them and us, the folk of the Old World. And we don’t drag no-one else into it if we can help it; that’s the way things have always been.
‘I wasn’t looking to meet anyone up here in this attic, just needed someplace to lie low for a while is all. Best you forget you ever saw me.’
‘I’m not afraid of a bunch of tramps.’
Luca shakes his head wearily. ‘Ain’t you been listening to anything I just told you? These ain’t just tramps or beggars. And if you get in their books, there’s nowhere you can go to be free of them. They have ears in the ditches and eyes in the water, it is said.’
‘I’ll call the police on them,’ I tell him.
‘Some of them are the police,’ Luca sighs. ‘This world ain’t what it seems, Anna.’ He reaches for the cheese, blows the dust off it and starts chewing again.
We sit like that for what seems a long time, while the wind howls in the rafters and the skylight keeps up its infernal banging.
‘I’ll get you some clothes out of the hamper,’ I say at last. ‘Pa doesn’t send out the laundry more than once a fortnight. It’ll be days before he misses anything. I can get you a shirt and some trousers, and socks I suppose.’
‘I’m fine barefoot,’ Luca tells me. ‘But I am obliged to you.’
‘There’s nine inches of snow outside!’
He shrugs. ‘I seen worse.’
I study him. His face is triangular, the nose long, the eyebrows thick above deep-hollowed eyes – a severe face, for a boy. There is no scrap of spare flesh on him – in fact he looks more gaunt than Pa. And his mop of hair looks as though it has never seen a brush. His nails are black-lined, and his knuckles seem too big for his hands. For all that, he looks more or less like a normal person, no more fearsome or strange than the children who throw names and stones at me down by the canal.
‘Would you hurt me, if you were the wolf?’ I ask him.
He stops eating, and stares at the floorboards.
‘Most likely not. I still know things, when I’m in the beast’s skin. I still can puzzle out what I’m at, and who is who and what is what – that’s how I knew to come here. But it can’t be relied upon wholly. There’s times the beast takes over all the way, and I just ain’t there no more, and it is just an animal. When that happens, no-one is safe from it.
‘Job’s been teaching me how to keep my own eyes when the Change comes, how to keep a rein on it, and turn back if I have a bad need to. The turning back is hard. Takes it out of me. I can’t do it every time.’
‘I’m glad you did this time.’
He smiles. ‘There weren’t no other thing to do. If I hadn’t, you’d have screamed the house down, no doubt.’
‘I would not!’
He studies me, and nods. ‘Maybe not then. You are a rare plucked ’un, I can see that, and you nothing but a little nipper too.’
‘I’ll be twelve in a week!’ I say hotly. ‘How old are you?’
Luca raises his eyebrows. ‘Bless you girl, I ain’t right sure. I know I saw fourteen, but it’s been a while since that.’
‘How can you not know your age?’
‘We thinks different, you and me. I sees time go by in moons and seasons more than years. I reckon I must be fifteen, or maybe a season more – two maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Will you be moving on again, now that Midwinter is over?’
‘Most like. We’ll head south when the year’s turned, to the Old Chalk Road. There’s many as gathers there, up on the Downs. We gots to keep on the move, our folk, or the peelers and the do-gooders start to creep around us like flies on honey. Seems they can’t bear to see folk live their lives by their own rules. That’s the nature o’ the world.
‘We gathers on the old high castle on the Downs. Used to be, there was a truce o’ sorts in that place, for a while. Tis the Roadmen’s sacred spot – but before that, it was sacred to us all. No-one wants to fight on ground such as that, ’tis holy earth.
‘But when we leaves it, we all go our own ways again, and scatter to every corner o’ the kingdom. That’s the way it has been since there was men to move the stones and make the old roads.
‘Queenie says everything gets smaller by the year. One day, there’ll be nowhere to wander at all, no woods to light a fire in, just streets and highways full of motors and acres of houses like little boxes. One day, even the great stone rings will be cast down and built over, and there won’t be nothing left of the Old World but memory.
‘I hope I don’t live to see that day, but if Queenie says it’s comin’, then it must be so. She
has the Sight, and can look ahead of us sometimes, and see things as they are going to be.’
‘I should hate to see that too,’ I say.
‘Why would you care?’
‘I like the trees and the woods and the open country just like you do. I may not sleep out in them and eat rabbit, but I don’t want to see the cities cover everything.’
Luca lies down on the dusty floorboards and pulls my coat close about him.
‘I’m tired. Might be I’ll sleep a while.’
‘You don’t have to leave in the morning, not first thing. No-one ever comes up here. I can bring you breakfast.’
‘Don’t you got no school to go to in the morning?’
‘I don’t go to school. Miss Hawcross comes and teaches me here in the house. And if the snow is still bad in the morning she will be late, and Pa is asleep in his study, and he always rises late when that happens.’
I cannot imagine that Luca is comfortable in this freezing room with nothing but my threadbare old coat, even though his eyes are closing already.
‘Here,’ I say, and give him my blanket.
He smiles, and wraps it around his feet and legs.
‘I’ll go get you some of Pa’s clothes now,’ I say, looking at the candle. There is not much life left in it.
‘Mmmph,’ he grunts, eyes closed.
‘Will I see you in the morning?’
‘Not likely,’ he murmurs. ‘Best not.’
‘Luca, I want to go to Wytham Wood again, and talk to Queenie and sit with you all. I want to hear more of the stories. I’m not afraid. Luca?’
He is snoring quietly.
I pick up the candle, which is little more than a leaf of light in a pool of creamy wax. Then I turn and tiptoe out of the attic, the skylight still banging out above me, and the wind hurling itself at the roof like a thing demented. At the bottom of the steps, I push the cabinet back against the hidden door. It will remain my secret alone.
It is the Longest Night, the turning of the year, and it feels as though the storm is transforming the world around me with every gust of wind.
11
