The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  Danny tucked his chin into his sweatshirt. “And you don’t have any ideas?”

  “Ah, no, sorry. But there was a story, was there not, that you managed to take his coat off him? That, surely, was a thing that held much power. Where did that power come from? And how did you find out about it?”

  The river in Great Butford. It had told Danny that there were many stories about the origins of Sammael’s coat, some about an ox called Xur, some about the eight stags who pulled the moon across the sky—

  Stags, he thought. That stag, silver in the moonlight.

  “I heard some stories,” he said. “But won’t this be something completely different?”

  “Who knows? It might be, or it might not.”

  Eight stags that pulled the moon across the sky. Maybe the stag from the woods would at least know something about that. It was the tiniest of hopes, but the only one he had.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, feeling the syllables grind up from the bottom of his lungs and break reluctantly into the air. “I guess you’re right. I think I know who to ask.”

  There was another whispering among the grasses and the single voice floated up again.

  “One last thing, Danny O’Neill.”

  “Yes?”

  “These are strange times. Rumors abound. And you come here asking about Chromos, and some of us are not surprised.”

  A cold chill crept up Danny’s spine. He knew that, whatever the grass was about to say, it wasn’t going to be good.

  “You humans know little of Chromos,” the grass continued. “You are closed to such things. But some are talking of a time to come, when the barrier between Chromos and earth will be broken. Not with small holes, but with one vast rip that will see the colors of Chromos pouring, pure and free, onto the earth. Who would possibly do such a thing, no one wishes to say. But if it should happen, it’s certain that the humans will come off worst of all, for of all creatures they are the most blind to the true chaos of the world, and they breathe the most life into their own fears. Chromos will not help those who fear: their fears will turn on them and drive them mad. We do not tell you this to frighten you. You talk to us of Chromos—we say only that if you are involved in some scheme, if you are meddling with Chromos, you should be aware of these stories. You should consider what kind of power you are meddling with.”

  The words brought Cath’s eager, fearless face into Danny’s mind, and for a second he watched her talking about Chromos, plunging heedlessly back into it, disappearing from the Sawtry’s concrete yard. And then the vision of Kalia leapt in front of her, lips drawn back from sharp, biting teeth, and Danny knew that Cath was the odd one out, not him. He was the same as most other people, and Chromos was a dangerous place.

  “I’m not meddling with it,” he said. “Although I reckon it’s not hard to guess who is.”

  “You are thinking about Sammael,” said the grass.

  Danny got to his feet, brushing the dirt off his hands and legs, trying to swallow the dryness in his throat. He thought about the stag’s silver-shadowed neck, those branching antlers.

  His heart leapt with something shocked and bright.

  “Yeah. But what do I know? Maybe it isn’t Sammael. Maybe I’ll only find out once I get into Chromos. When I do, I’ll let you know.”

  Wedging the front wheel of his bike between his knees, he bashed the handlebars back into position and swung his leg over the crossbar, noticing that his trousers had a huge rip down one calf. His mum wouldn’t like that, but what did it matter? He wasn’t going home just yet.

  * * *

  The herd of deer were grazing at the edge of the woodland among a cloud of cow parsley. The stag stood a little way off, pausing between mouthfuls of grass to raise his head and glance around, but Danny, on his belly, managed to creep to within twenty feet of the animal before he sensed him, jerked his head up, and stood alert, flaring his nostrils.

  Danny gripped the stick and whispered inside his mind. “Hello?”

  The stag seemed to recognize the voice as that of a deer, because he didn’t run away.

  “Who’s that?” he said. “Are you come to challenge me?”

  “No,” said Danny, wondering how far he’d get in a fight with those antlers.

  “Are you known to the herd of Isbjin al-Orr?”

  “No,” whispered Danny, his heart beginning to fail him. Was the stag about to challenge him to a fight?

  “Identify yourself, and your business in greeting me,” said the stag, tossing his head so that his antlers appeared to shoot, for an instant, up into the white sky.

  “I’m not a deer,” said Danny. “I’ll come out. But please don’t try and fight me.”

  “What?” said the stag. “You’re not a deer? Impossible. Show yourself.”

  Danny got to his feet, brushing the dirt off his knees. He felt small and shabby in comparison with the stag. He could run him through with a single antler if he wanted to.

  He stepped forward, treading as quietly as he could.

  “I’m Danny,” he said. “Hello.”

  The stag eyed him, sniffing at the air.

  “I am Isbjin al-Orr, head of my herd,” he said. “But I don’t understand. You are a human—a young human male, if I observe correctly—and yet you can make words and speak in sentences. It was my understanding that humans could only make a series of indistinguishable sounds and communicate the finer points of their meanings through body language. But you—you have learned to talk?”

  “I could always talk,” said Danny. “People talk all the time to each other. But I can talk to you, too. Now I can, anyway.”

  “But how?” asked Isbjin al-Orr, one of his front hooves tapping twice on the green earth.

  “It’s … it’s…” Danny floundered. He’d never actually told the truth about the stick to anyone except Tom, who hadn’t believed it, and he didn’t particularly want to start telling the truth now. “… It’s to do with Sammael…,” he said, almost stumbling over the name. “Not anything bad, though. Just to do with him, so I can talk to things.”

  Sammael. What kind of an excuse was that? It left a dirty taste in Danny’s mouth. He didn’t want to link himself to Sammael in any way whatsoever.

  A rustling in the trees made the stag turn his head and flick his rounded ears.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a sound,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “I listen to them all. Sammael, you say? He is a creature of our young fawns’ fairy tales. How on earth would that make you able to talk to me?”

  “It wasn’t him, exactly,” said Danny. “I sort of … got … hit by lightning. Yes, that was it—I got hit by lightning, and then I could understand everything.”

  “It’s lightning now, is it? Not Sammael?” The stag flared his nostrils.

  “No—well, yes, it was. Lightning. It was when Sammael could control storms, and I got struck by lightning then. So it is sort of his fault. But I don’t have anything to do with him now.” Danny stopped hastily, not knowing where his lies were leading. In a moment he’d say something so preposterous that the stag might feel tempted to lower those branching antlers and thrust them toward him.

  “Anyway…,” he said, trying to think of a subtle way to bring up the subject of Chromos and quickly deciding that more lies were a bad idea. “I heard about this place, Chromos, where Sammael lives. And I need to get there, so I wondered if you’d have any ideas about how he gets there.”

  “I do not believe you,” said the stag. “Your tongue is certainly not silver. More an obvious shade of furry pink from what I can see. However, we deer do not hide things; it is not our way. Neither are we in the habit of inquiring into the affairs of strangers. In simple answer to you, therefore—in our stories, Sammael does not live in Chromos. He travels through Chromos to his home in the high ether. Our stories say that he has been playing with Chromos for thousands of years, ever since the death of the Great Ox, Xur.”

  “What?” said Danny.

  �
��Oh, it is the seventh of our legends,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “It’s a tale about Phaeton, the son of Apollo, the Sun God.”

  “Tell me,” said Danny. He leaned back against a tree and rested his head against the bark, breathing in the wriggling life of the woodland air.

  “Very well,” said the stag, and he began.

  CHAPTER 15

  PHAETON

  “So we say that back in the beginning of the world, in the time when everything was new, the Sun God, Apollo, drew the sun across the sky each day, riding in a chariot pulled by eight magnificent stags. And Apollo had a son called Phaeton.

  “Phaeton was a keen, curious boy. He craved to ride with his father in the chariot, and he begged Apollo to let him climb up beside him, but Apollo always refused.

  “‘There is only space for one,’ he would point out. ‘Where would I put you? Would you ride on the back of a stag?’ And he would laugh and turn away, and give Phateon a harness to clean.

  “The truth of the matter was that Phaeton’s mother was a mortal human, and Apollo knew that his son could never withstand the heat of the sun close at his back, but he didn’t like to discourage the boy so early in his life so he kept him at bay with smiles and jokes.

  “Phaeton grew sulky and began to desire, more than anything, to drive his father’s chariot across the skies. And one morning, more silently than a mouse on a velvet carpet, he crept to the stables where the eight stags were dozing, harnessed them quietly to the chariot, then clambered up onto its narrow platform. The thick reins seemed impossibly large in his hands. He could barely close his fists around them.

  “A sense of glory came upon him. As the stags stepped through the gateway, he felt as though he had found what he had been born for. I am the son of Apollo, he thought grandly. I am the son of—why, the son of the very sun itself!

  “To begin with, the great sun only glowed warmly. But of course gradually it gained heat and strength, and as it grew hotter, Phaeton’s back began to burn. Crying out in pain, he dropped the reins and clung to the front of the chariot, trying to cower away from the sun’s great flames. The stags, free from any restraining hand, at once doubled their speed. With no charioteer to guide them, they galloped closer and closer to earth, the flames roaring out in their wake, and the mountaintops began to scorch and shrivel as they passed overhead.

  “Closer still they came. Trees caught fire, the grass crumbled, and the hillsides became barren. The seas began to steam. The creatures on earth screamed in fear at this terrible sight, but what could they do? They ran away, they tried to hide, but there was no escape. Soon the world was ablaze.

  “One creature wasn’t affected by the fire, though—a creature new to the world, who bore the name Sammael. He had an affinity with the skies and came to the world’s aid by gathering together a great storm. This storm sent out a sleek thunderbolt that, with one sharp crack, knocked Phaeton from his perch and sent him tumbling down to the earth below. He fell onto the horns of the Great Ox, Xur, and was so deeply pierced that all his blood drained away into the earth and he died.

  “The stags, their load lightened, let the skies draw them upward again and continued their way back to Apollo’s stables. But when Phaeton did not return with the chariot, Apollo went searching for his son, hoping despite everything that he might find Phaeton alive. Alas, he found only his son’s bloodless corpse, with Xur standing beside it.

  “Now, nobody knew much about Xur, save that he was the Guardian of the Earth, and the gods had all sworn never to harm him. But Apollo was seized by grief and rage, so he killed Xur with one blow of his battle-ax, then carried Phaeton tenderly home to receive the last farewells of his mother.

  “Sammael, who had been following these events, came in search of Xur’s corpse. He regarded the huge body with interest.

  “‘That’s a fine ox,’ he said to himself. ‘And intriguing. It’d be a shame to let it go to waste.’

  “So he skinned the ox and cured its hide. In time he made himself a pair of boots out of its skin. These boots had powers that no other creature could have foreseen. Various legends began to spread across the world: that the creature who wore them could control minds, that he could control the moon, the stars—even the course of the very sun itself. Some legends told how, when the race of humans came to cover the entire earth, the wearer of these boots could walk between all of them in a single stride.

  “Who knows whether any of these stories are true. But one story above all was told and retold, countless times: that over and beyond the earth there exists a land called Chromos, where all the wonders and disasters of hope live in a thousand colors wrapped around the things of the earth itself. And those boots gave Sammael dominion over that endlessly colored world.”

  * * *

  Danny’s blood had run as cold as his pinched skin. The rustling of deer in the cow parsley became louder, and faint chewing sounds scratched at the air.

  Sammael’s boots. Made from a legendary ox killed in the first days of the world. There was no way he’d be able to steal them, use them to get into Chromos, take Kalia, and try to make a bargain with Sammael for Tom’s sand. It was a crazy idea.

  But if what the grass had said about Chromos was true, then simply getting Tom back wouldn’t be enough. Danny would have to stop Sammael as well. Getting his boots would be the perfect way to do it.

  Once Sammael couldn’t travel through Chromos, he’d have to stay up in the high ether, where he belonged. All this would stop happening—Sammael controlling people’s minds, making them sell their souls, making them try to kill each other. All that fear would be gone.

  Danny saw it—the ending to his story. Sammael banished, Danny O’Neill free. No more trees struck by lightning. No more Toms with guilty, secretive faces.

  “How could I get the boots?” he said abruptly, forgetting that he was speaking out loud.

  The rustling sounds stopped immediately, as did every other sound in the forest except the hissing wind.

  Isbjin al-Orr stayed still, as though the sound of Danny’s actual voice was not much of a surprise to him.

  “It’s only a story,” he said. “Sammael doesn’t exist. If he did, he’d be hundreds of thousands of years old by now. Millions, even. Or billions.”

  Danny shook his head. “Something exists,” he said. “And it calls itself Sammael, and it wears boots just like you said.”

  “I have always known that humans were strange,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “But stranger still are you. I tell you, child, it is a story. It has been repeated so much over the entire length of the existence of deer that its origins must have been different entirely. I told you the story we have now, at this moment in time. It is not the same story as it was when it began, that is for certain. So it cannot be the whole story. It is only our version, for our time.”

  “Did you know that grass talks?” said Danny. “It’s so sharp that anything one blade says can get repeated millions of times by others, and it stays the same. How do you know your story is wrong? It sounds right to me.”

  “Because I have seen time,” said the stag, and as if to confirm this, the sunlight glinted on the gray hairs gathering around his nostrils and mouth. “I have watched the days rise and set, and the moons come and go, and the seasons turn by in their endless change. Nothing is ever the same as it was the previous year—I have seen the woodlands shrink and the crops grow tall. I have heard the voices of my sisters and brothers, and I have seen them appear, live, and die. I have seen the world, and I know that words are never true.”

  “Yeah?” said Danny. “But you’ve never seen Sammael, have you? And I have.”

  “You have?” The stag lowered his head, and Danny saw that, despite the gray hairs around his muzzle, his eyes were deep and strongly black. “Tell me, then. Tell me your story.”

  So Danny told him, in as few words as he could manage, about the summer before. He left out the part about the sycamore tree but told all the rest—the hunt for his parents, the disco
very of the Book of Storms, the great storm in which he’d battled Sammael—as though it were he, not the stick, that had the magical power of speech with all nature. He knew, as he told it, that he was recounting a legend with himself as the hero. It was easy to make yourself sound heroic if you left out the parts about feeling alone and scared, and never really being all that sure of what to do.

  When he had finished, Isbjin al-Orr raised his head again and looked up to the sky.

  “It is a good story,” he said. “To hear of such things, I—who have been bound by the earth all my life, tied to its seasons, and its laws—I shiver with delight. To hear that some of our stories have a truth about them, when I have long supposed that they are all fictions for the entertainment of young fawns—it makes my heart sing with wonder.”

  Danny smiled, happy to have impressed the stag. It was something, to stand in the bright morning air, next to such a creature, and to hear it sing your praises.

  Isbjin al-Orr sniffed, drawing the smells of the green-leaved trees into his nostrils, and continued.

  “The world is magical, beyond doubt. I feel it, but I rarely see it. And you have shown another small part of that magic to me. I thank you deeply. If I can be of any further assistance to you, please find me again. I have a strong desire to break out into the unknown and to throw up my antlers against whatever I find there. And as I have not long left in this world, it would be a shame to miss such an opportunity.”

  Danny rested his palm flat against the tree behind him, feeling the roughness of its bark. Could he get the stag to help him somehow? The warnings of the grass rang in his ears. Chromos pouring onto earth, humans going mad …