The Book of the Crowman

by Joseph D'lacey

  It isn’t long before Megan spots a thick knot of woodland up ahead. Relieved that the map and her reading of it is correct, she hurries on releasing a sigh as she disappears from view among the trees.

  The coppice is comprised mainly of pines, with a few deciduous trees struggling to survive between them. It is dark and sheltered and its shadows are wild. Megan revels in the comfort and sanctuary it provides. She couldn’t have asked for a better place to prepare.

  Near the lower border of the coppice, she shrugs off her pack and collapses onto the soft cushion of brown pine needles. She massages her calves and thighs, takes off her boots and kneads her aching feet. When she has eased the tension from her lower limbs and replaced her boots, she wraps her travelling blanket around herself, lays her head on her pack and allows her mind to drift away from her body so that both may rest.

  34

  Two branchings from the Grand Union brought Gordon onto the Coventry Canal.

  Here the stream of human traffic was almost constant and the sense of excitement, of being part of something important, grew. Many of the groups sang as they marched: old rugby songs and football chants, hits from the days when everyone had music at their fingertips. Some of the rabble carried instruments – anything from guitars to recorders – and when they played in unison even Gordon felt something new and vibrant dance in his heart. He hurried past, singing or humming with each group as he came into the city of Coventry.

  The canal passed through an area of new residences that had once been a desirable place to live. Now they were shells, their glass smashed, smoke stains rising up from balconies and windows. He climbed the steps leading up from the towpath and crossed a black footbridge spanning the ring road. On the other side, he descended into the city. Near the disused bus station, beside a vast car park where every vehicle was no more than a carapace of rust, Green Men had gathered in their thousands to make a new city of tents, shelters, cardboard boxes and lean-tos. The flimsiest of these were underneath an overpass to give them a little shelter from the elements.

  This was not like London. Here there was no threat of roving patrols. The Ward had failed to hold this city, though they’d tried many times to take it back by force. Coventry, one of the hardest-hit British cities during the Second World War, had a proud, flinty heart. The people here, some born in the city but many more having recently arrived from elsewhere, appeared uncowed by their circumstances.

  Gordon hadn’t witnessed such simple joy of spirit since his childhood. He remembered now how children had played together in break time, sung songs and chased each other in breathless, laughing circles. He remembered how grownups had gathered around tables to eat and drink and tell stories.

  For some reason, this scene of ramshackle chaos and camaraderie reminded him of Christmas. The colours of Christmas were so bright in his memory they were like the intense, individual flavours of boiled sweets. Sweet indeed, those recollections, when hereabouts all was dirt-grey and charcoal-drab, when the clothes of every person were stained with the grime of the road and the touch of the land, when the smell of people was reminiscent of the smell of animals. Yet Gordon was happy to walk among them, for their spirits were as bright as Yuletide, as pure and as innocent as any rejoicing human could be. He relished it all. This was a time before bloodshed and such times might not return, neither soon nor ever.

  As he walked, dislocated and spectral amid the cheer, people noticed his coat of feathers, glancing at him a moment longer than they looked at anyone else. But none made comment. Black feathers, Gordon noticed, were common here. Woven into people’s hair, sewn around the knees of their trousers and elbows of their sleeves, worn as necklaces and charms. Black feathers even decorated many of the weapons resting on shoulders or worn through belts or hanging in decorated slings from backs and chests.

  Gordon laughed to see it.

  Oh, yes! He is here!

  How it could be, Gordon wasn’t sure, but the Crowman no longer walked the streets of London. The promise of war had brought him north. Gordon could feel the Crowman’s presence both in the minds of the people and out here among them. The Crowman walked here, somewhere nearby; Gordon knew it. Reaching out, sensing that presence among the throng, Gordon picked up his pace.

  The Green Men were here in vast numbers. Everyone who had journeyed here to fight the Ward, they were all Green Men now, whether they cared for such a title or not. Yes, there were a few among them who only partially understood and plenty who misunderstood, but the wearing of black feathers by so many who now banded together; that was a sign of change. There was a chance. Right here, right now. If the Crowman could carry these ordinary people into battle and if they, in turn, could carry him in their hearts, the days of the Ward and the years of the Black Dawn would have their end. There would be something beyond it all. A place for children; a future.

  As daylight began to wane, Gordon continued to search, among the people yet somehow soaring above them; appreciating their numbers and the strength of their combined will. Beneath the tarmac and concrete of Coventry’s city centre, the land thrilled at the touch of thousands of faithful feet, feet that longed to walk barefoot in wild meadows and wade carefree in cool rivers and unpolluted lakes. These people yearned to come home to the land, to listen to its silent song, to sit upon the bones of great Grandmother Earth and accept her wisdom instead of imposing their own upon her.

  The people around him grew greater in number and navigating between them required more skill. Many of them had stopped moving and were straining to hear a man speaking somewhere up ahead. Curious, Gordon pushed his way through the now almost static crowd.

  At the base of a broad pillar supporting the overpass, standing on the roof of a double-decker bus, a man addressed the throng. Gordon glanced around. Green Men still arrived from every direction, all of them pushing forward to hear the speaker’s voice as though it were a popular show – either that or some strange outdoor benediction. In the gathering dusk, Gordon stepped between the people of the crowd like a man stepping between reeds, or stalks of corn. People grumbled as he passed, some of them trying to stop him with their elbows. Unfazed, Gordon pressed forward, coming almost to the front of the multitude.

  From here he could see the speaker clearly and make out his words.

  Atop the bus – once red, now wheel-less, rusted and hollowed out by abuse and neglect – it was a ragged man who held court with such magnetism. He wore not clothes but woven twists of rag. The filthy ropes of cloth were draped over a gnarled and knobbly frame of bones, secured with knots here and there and a belt held the mess together at his middle.

  Each time he moved, the man’s grimy flesh appeared between the plaited strips of remnant fabric and Gordon saw he was pocked from head to toe, the survivor of some skin virus perhaps, or a victim of some gradually consuming pox or cancer. He was blind, this man, and a rope around his waist secured him to a bolt driven into the concrete pillar behind him. Thus he could walk in an arc on the roof of the bus without falling.

  Walk he did, like some wild animal recently captured and imprisoned in a cage; searching for an exit along a few feet of barrier, an exit which did not exist. The angles of his jaw and cheek bones were so sharp his head appeared barbed somehow, and his matted hair hung in clots about his face.

  He raved, this blind skin-sick man, and the people cheered to hear the rasp and rattle of his shattered voice.

  “Beneath this concrete and tarmac, beneath the very foundations of this city the Earth is gathering herself. She waits for you!”

  The crowd raised up its hands and voices in a cheer.

  “She does not sleep, my good people. She does not die. She lives! And she will take you any way she can. She will take your hoe and your shovel and she will welcome your return. She will take your snares and traps and place her bounty within them. She will take your blood, the blood you go to give in battle, and she will thank your children for your sacrifice.

  “She lives, I tell you! She
lives the way only a blind man who has sinned against her can see. She is not dead. But without you, good people of this land, without you, be assured the Earth will die and every creature that depends upon it will die too. The world will cease to spin and the spirits that have always called this place home will go elsewhere in the universe to weave their magic. And every soul that ever lived or died on Earth will be lost to oblivion.

  “She lives and she demands to live!”

  The man staggered as he walked, afflicted in ways Gordon could only guess at. He looked as though he had been beaten by an army of men, his limbs broken and the bones badly reset. Every finger on his hands was crooked. When he pointed into the crowd, his fingers were the snapped branches of dying trees.

  “I see you, good people! I see your proudly worn black feathers and I know what they signify.” The man’s voice fell to a hiss. “He is here…”

  And rose to a roar.

  “HE IS HERE!”

  He threw his broken arms heavenward and then pointed once more into the crowd, his bent fingers sweeping the ranks as though he was searching for something, following his broken fingers with his blind eyes as he scanned.

  “The Crowman walks among you. You’ve seen the visions. You’ve heard him in your dreams. You’ve told his stories and in doing so you’ve kept him alive. I’ve heard the rumours, we all have. He’s a killer of children, a bringer of pestilence and war, a god of earthquakes and storms. The Ward would have you believe the Crowman’s arrival signifies the end for all of us.”

  The man slumped forward as though exhausted. He fell to his knees. His head hung to his chest. His filthy, tangled hair became indistinguishable from his rag robes.

  The crowd fell silent, waiting.

  His head came up. His eyes, wide and white, showed the cracks and punctures and rends which had blinded him. He held his broken hands out to the crowd in supplication, shaking his head, as though at their blindness, their ignorance.

  “The Crowman is the future, good people. The Crowman is the heart of the world. He is here. He is alive and that heart yet beats, deep beneath our feet and in the chest of every true Green Man and Woman.”

  The Rag Man knelt on his scarred, bony knees and nodded.

  “Yes. It’s true. It’s all true. I have seen because I have eyes no other man has. It was the Crowman who gave me these eyes, my true eyes. And he sent me out into the dying world tell you all what only I can see.”

  The Rag Man struggled to his feet.

  “Do you want to know what I see?”

  People in the crowd nodded. Some even said “yes”. The old man raised his voice.

  “Do you want to know what I see?”

  All around came shouts of “yes” and “tell us what you see”. It wasn’t enough.

  “DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT I SEE?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES, YES, YES!”

  Gordon found his own voice adding to the chaos of answers. He believed it more than anyone here, he wanted to know what the Rag Man saw. He wanted to know everything. Most of all he wanted to find the Crowman. The Crowman was here among them, somewhere in this city. Somewhere in the crowd perhaps. As though a cloud had cast a shadow on a warm day, Gordon shivered. He spun, scanning the multitude for the figure he longed to see. There was nothing but dirty faces, faces upturned to the Rag Man and screaming for his answer.

  The crowd’s pleas died down when the Rag Man used his ravaged hands to calm them, patting down the noise with gentle movements. When there was silence, utter silence, he spoke, weeping.

  “I see nightfall in the morning. I see the Black Dawn! You will say it is the end of everything but there is light in that darkness, good people. A light that will carry us into the Bright Day. Men and women of this land, I see the future. The Crowman has come. He is here. Find him. Let him lead you.”

  The silence gathered and rose like a spell. The Rag Man bowed. Only then did the assembled masses break the hush with rapturous claps, whistles and cheers.

  35

  The crowd dispersed slowly, back to their tents or canvas shelters or into cardboard-covered sleeping bags beneath the overpass. Many walked back towards the old bus station and some sought sanctuary a short way up the hill in the cathedral. A few of the listeners stayed where they were. Like Gordon, they wanted a more intimate audience with the blind prophet.

  Daylight was replaced by the weak glow of flickering lamps and small fires. The Rag Man would have been lost without his helpers, a trio of boys somewhat younger than Gordon and dressed in similar ropes of reclaimed fabric to their master. They unhooked him from his tether in the concrete column and led him to a hole cut in the roof of the bus. From there he descended a ladder into the upper deck and took a seat in the back row.

  While he waited his turn, Gordon shinned up a lamppost nearby to get a closer look. One by one, those who wished to speak with the Rag Man were ushered in by the boys and climbed the steps to the upper deck. Gordon could hear murmurs of conversation from the back of the bus but nothing distinct and it was too dark in the candlelit gloom to clearly see what took place. The Rag Man appeared to bestow blessings, often touching the heads or faces of his visitors with his broken fingers before they left him, but more than that, Gordon couldn’t make out.

  He was last to enter. Coventry was falling into darkness and all around flames lashed upwards from oil drums and fire pits made of brick and breezeblock.

  Candles, flickering in the breeze that pushed through the bus’s glassless windows, lit Gordon’s way up the stairs into the top deck. The limbs of the boy who led him appeared and disappeared through the ropes of his garment as he walked and Gordon couldn’t help but think how cold such a uniform must be. On reaching the upper floor, the boy and his two fellows retreated to the front of the bus and waited, as though vigilant for trouble.

  “You can leave us,” the Rag Man said, waving a crooked hand at the boys.

  Gordon looked back. They were hesitant.

  “No harm will come to me, boys. What more harm can there be? Go now.”

  The three rag boys, barefoot and sullen, descended the stairs but Gordon was sure they waited just below, their ears cocked upwards to catch every word.

  There was an upturned plastic milk crate in the aisle. Gordon took his place there. The Rag Man sat in the middle of the back row of seats. His face didn’t look real in the wavering glow of the candles, nor did his broken body. This form he’d taken was merely a vehicle, a hermit-crab’s shell. In trying to see beneath his hideous armour Gordon missed the evidence that was right before his eyes.

  “You’ve been searching for him for quite some time now,” said the Rag Man, his voice seeming to pass through broken bottles to exit his lips.

  “How do you know that?”

  The Rag Man laughed; shards and tinkles, hobnail boots stirring gravel.

  “Have you found him yet? That’s the important question.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re close.”

  “I think so,” said Gordon. “You said yourself he walks among us. You said he was here.”

  The Rag Man’s blind eyes stared and flickered as though trying to catch a glimpse of something moving fast inside the bus. Gordon couldn’t help but look over his shoulder. There was nothing there.

  “Yes,” said the Rag Man when his sightless orbs had ceased to scan the inside of the bus. “I do my best to speak the truth these days. The truth as I see it. As near as I can get.”

  Gordon ignored what appeared to be the beginnings of a digression. He’d searched too long too waste time on an old man’s stories.

  “Can you help me find him?” he asked the Rag Man.

  “Help you? You don’t need any help. It’s your destiny to find him. No matter what you do, you cannot escape that one simple fact. You and the Crowman will be united.”

  United? As friends? As brothers in arms?

  “What does that mean?”

  The Rag Man began to coug
h, his throat clattering like a wood chipper. The spasm went on for a long time and when it finally stopped, the Rag Man was breathless and shrunken.

  “It means,” he said in a cracked whisper, “that your search is almost over.”

  “When, though? When will it be over?”

  The Rag Man grinned, exposing a few broken, blackened teeth.

  “You haven’t changed all that much, have you?”

  “What?”

  “Still impetuous and impatient. Keen to be moving on…”

  Gordon’s skin chilled. Did he know this man? Had they met on the road sometime?

  “I’ve never been too far behind you, you know. Never too far away. And even when I wasn’t really looking I heard a little morsel of news here and there about your travels through this half dead land of ours. It seems you go by many aliases.”

  Gordon stood and backed away, stumbling over the milk crate and catching hold of the back of a seat for support. He did know this man. He had tried very hard to forget him.

  “Grimwold.”

  He’d drawn Gordon to this place somehow, knowing exactly what it was he wanted to hear. And now, lured into the bus, he was about to suffer the man’s retribution.

  “Sit down, please, Louis Palmer. Or don’t you use that name any more?”

  In the warmth of his coat pocket, Gordon’s hand found the comfortable shape of his knife. He heard footsteps on the stairs. In an instant the blade was free and he’d turned to face the three boys.

  Behind him the Rag Man stood up.

  “Please! No more bloodshed. There’s been too much already and there’s so much more to come. Louis, put away your weapon. Boys, I want you to leave us alone. Go into the city and don’t come back until morning. I mean it.”

  No one moved at first. Gordon didn’t see anger in the eyes of the rag boys, only concern for their derelict master. Gordon brought his breathing and heartbeat under control. He folded away his lock knife and slipped it back into his pocket. The rag boys retreated down the stairs. Gordon looked out into the night and only when they’d passed between a dozen fires and were out of sight did he turn and face Grimwold.