‘There you are …’ the Beetle Lady said conversationally as she squatted down beside him. Ralph had no idea where she’d got glow-worms from at this time of year, but she certainly had a glow about her, unless she’d simply ornamented herself with the embers of the fire. ‘Not so far now, eh?’
‘Do you really expect us to get to Invercombe?’
‘Ahh—but I’ve been there many times. Just as you have, Master Meynell. Why, otherwise, do you think we’re so alike?’
If he strained his eyes—or if he closed them, which was far easier—Ralph could sometimes imagine he could see the prim woman with whom he’d once shared a dinner at Invercombe, and then met with Marion at Hotwells. But it was like most things; it came and went. No wonder, he thought as something small and black-backed crawled from the edge of the Beetle Lady’s mouth and she picked it from her cheek and cupped it and set it flying into the dark, that he hadn’t recognised Doctress Foot when he’d seen her captured in the pit in that Droitwich engine house. But then, he almost had, hadn’t he? Once again, the uncertainties began. And from there, if the story she told and ornamented and amended and expanded according to her and the other followers’ moods was to be believed, she’d been released in some abandoned village and had reached Invercombe just as summer was fading. Whatever it was she’d seen there had given her madness this greater focus—that, or this war, or what his own soldiers had done to her—but she was certainly possessed of an appealingly delirious certainty. No wonder the followers were drawn.
‘Why did you claim you were Marion Price, when my men arrested you?’
‘How else would you have come to me, eh? And Marion is here—she’s with us all. Listen!’ The Beetle Lady cocked her head. ‘Can’t you hear it in the guns?’
Not that there were any guns firing within their hearing at that moment, but Ralph knew what she meant, just as he now found he generally understood whatever the Beetle Lady was driving at; he’d even ceased to find it worrying. For Ma-ri-on was everywhere, even in these mutters and snores. And so was the place of lost rest and summer and repose which was Invercombe. It was true that he’d been there many times in his mingled memories and dreams, just as the Beetle Lady said. He coughed and inspected his hands, but they were so filthy that he couldn’t tell if there was any fresh blood. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered so very much now. They were heading towards Invercombe. Whatever it was that was waiting there, he couldn’t think of a better place to die.
VIII
THE NEW HALLS OF THE GREAT GUILD OF TELEGRAPHERS could be said to face both East and West, for the light of dawn and sunset shone entirely through them. Set midway along Wagstaffe Mall, the structure appeared to hang on wires, and played tricks with the refracted images of London which were captured in its many huge planes of angled glass. Hallam Tower often hung there; a dancing needle. So, frail and refracted, did the massive pyramid of Great Westminster Park. It was on the itinerary of every recently published guidebook of London. Birds flew into it, imagining it part of the sky.
To Alice, it had come to represent much of her guild’s ambition. It was resolutely modern, uplifting, transparent, and yet solidly well engineered. The onrush of the war, though, had caught the building at a precarious moment, and many contracts for the final fittings and decorations were left unfulfilled. The building was a monument, in the botched interior construction and misuse of intended spaces, to the demands of this conflict.
Up in her office a shifterm after news of Ralph’s bizarre arrest and yet more bizarre disappearance had reached her, and in no mood to exchange her usual pleasantries with the staff, she stood out on her balcony. The structure was glass, moulded entire with spells and filaments of crystal. Alice, as she stood there, seemed to hang in nothing but space and air. London was blue and grey and gold beneath her. The tiny traffic moved along Wagstaffe Mall. The trees were flames of phoenix feather. She’d dreamed of moments such as this long ago back in her aunt’s house by the waterfall when she’d merely been Alice Bowdly-Smart, but in truth the day-to-day business of being Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell often left her wearied.
Alice sighed a cloudy breath. She’d have leaned against the cold rail for support were the glass not so sharp. She had a meeting at eleven with High Command, and their eyes, she knew, would be looking questioningly at her. Life was so grimly unfair. Even the maternal anguish she felt to think of her only son roving ill and unprotected across the war-ravaged landscape—for she was sure that he was still living—seemed a poor shadow of her old feelings. Like this sunlight, like this beautiful city, nothing now touched her with the strength it once had. Her bones ached. Her mind swarmed with half-grasped thoughts and feelings. Her beauty was fading. Of course, she was still referred to as striking, as graceful, as elegant, as—and this was the most hateful phrase of all—exquisitely well preserved. But they were comparing her to the harpies and bloated sea-beasts who wrongly imagined they shared their age with her, and not with laughing and youthful debutantes.
Feeling discomfort in her hands, raising them from the crystal rail, she saw that she had been gripping it so hard that they were smeared with blood. Mere scratches, but the potions and foundations which she now so carefully applied over her entire flesh had smudged and run. She turned the revealed flesh in this brighter light. No longer quite flesh at all; it reminded her more of part-thawed ice, and this late autumn sun was so bright that she could see her bones as well, which looked fine enough, considering the pain they nowadays caused her, although they, too, were edged with a sort of translucency …
This was nothing like the near-instant changing she had once inflicted at Battersea on poor Silus—now what had been his second name?—but cumulative aether poisoning, according to most of the many books she’d now studied on the subject, was at least as common as a single catastrophic event. She put her state mostly down to all the years of spells she had cast from her portmanteau, and perhaps to Invercombe as well, and the wilder experiments of disembodiment she’d risked that summer there, and to the backwash of the Falling which had so nearly killed her.
She had wondered over the older texts which portrayed the changed as monsters, witches, goblins and demons. They had been burned then, or ostracised. Later, they had been branded and chained and put to use for the unusual proficiency they sometimes possessed in the mastery of spells. The same was apparently happening during this war, especially in the West, which of course had the benefit of a ready supply from Einfell. More interesting still were the gaudier tales and myths which flourished about the lives of some changelings. Goldenwhite, for example, who was said to have led the poor and the dispossessed to the very gates of London in the Wars of Reunification before she was betrayed and burned at the stake.
The time of her meeting with High Command was growing closer, and Alice knew that she would have to go back inside and remake-up herself for it. But it would be amusing, really, to come lolloping in to see them one day as whatever it was that she was becoming. Of course, she’d never imagined herself receding into bland dotage. And how much worse, she sometimes wondered as she studied the Mark which was now nearly entirely faded on her wrist, would her life become if she was Chosen, changed? And she was sure that she was beginning to experience some of what might possibly be the benefits of this new state. Just as her ears were growing weaker, she sometimes found herself hearing things which, from the surprise with which people responded to them, she realised they had merely thought. Of course, it all added to her reputation for perspicacity. And then there was the extra pull of spells. Aether, this city and all the people in it and the westward-threading telephone lines of her own guild, seemed to be calling to her in inexpressible song.
It was a far more composed and energetic and, indeed, happy greatgrandmistress who faced High Command on that unseasonably bright November morning than any of its members might have expected. If there had been a slight loss of faith in her, a feeling that she was no longer quite the acutely able and matur
ely beautiful woman whom they all admired and secretly coveted, it was soon dissipated by the challenging gaze of her blue eyes and the smile with which she swept the room. Even the sad business of her son—the sheer grace with which she’d accepted it!—enhanced rather than diminished her. Still, and even then, there would normally have been queries and murmurs at what she was proposing. Not that any of them would have ever doubted her ability—individually, they all knew and owed her too much—but there were, or at least should have been, practical considerations of security and chains of command to be addressed.
But light shone through the windows, and Alice Meynell shone with it. Even the cynics, and that included most who sat around this long table, were inexpressibly moved. For they were sick of this war and its death and mayhem, and had privately come to wonder whether questions of free trade and taxation and slavery and local influence had ever been worth the sacrifices which were now being made. They feared, as well, that the general population would challenge the prosecution of this war if it didn’t end far better and more quickly than now seemed likely, and that they would be challenged with it. And here was Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell offering to go west herself, and either take or destroy the continuing open sore which was Hereford. This, as she raised her arms and her hair fell sheer and silver as the light and her whole body and everything else about her seemed to float on nothing but sheer hope and aspiration like the building she’d engendered, was the essential truth they’d lost in these years of attrition.
IX
DAWN WAS COMING, blurring the night’s certainties in slow shades of grey. It was incredibly cold, and the fire was waning. Ralph shuffled himself deeper into a rotting blanket. He wasn’t sure whether it was he or this moisture-laden air which was trembling, but the scene which quivered at its edges in the fire’s fading smoke and light was certainly feverish enough. He shivered, and coughed again. The air shook with him. Then, as the wind rose and the snow resettled and gusted, rising white from the black ground and twinkling in flakes of flame towards the black, black sky, the Beetle Lady rose herself to her feet and started shouting.
‘No, listen, No—join in…’ She stood wavering as the light and the carapaces crawled over her. ‘She’s coming, can’t you hear it? She’s coming …’
Heads which were heads nodded. Ears which were ears listened and heard. The wind gave a balehound moan.
‘Marion Price, yes, yes, I once knew her. Knew her for what she was and what she will be. Knew then that she would lead us all into this final battle. No longer Clerkenwell, no. No longer Boadicea or Goldenwhite. No longer London or Bristol. No longer East or West. She’s back in the past but here as well before us in the future present. Leading us on into the realms beyond cold and thirst. Yes, yes, I was there at the place beyond Einfell which is called Invercombe. I saw it all and believed. And listen, listen, can’t you hear the guns … ?’
Boom-ba-booom.
Ma-ri-on …
Another morning was arriving at the camp of the followers, and a man who was a priest, or who at least had assumed something resembling the raiment of one, was moving amid the bizarre throng. In his bare hands, he was carrying a shell case which had been heated on the campfire’s ashes. It took a serious effort of will for Ralph to take it when it was offered to him, but the brass was so beautifully magicked that its metal was cool. Either that, he supposed, staring into its steaming, spinning contents, or the flesh on the palms of his hands was now entirely dead. The dark swirl of hymnal wine within was threaded with twilit agitations of ghostgas. Tipping the shell case up, he swallowed and handed it back to the priest, who bore it on to the next penitent.
By now, Ralph was almost used to such rituals, and knew what would come next. First the blood, and now came the body. A huge haunch of meat which, for all the fat-dripping weight of it, he couldn’t remember seeing cooking on the fire. Some kind of ham, far bigger and richer than even the massive joints he’d found ambered in honey amid the breakfast collations at Walcote, was passed to him. Delicious strips of tendon ran eagerly through his loose teeth. Juices slipped over his chin. Part of him thought that he never tasted meat this sweetly delicious, and part of him gagged and fought to swallow, and saw that the stuff which the other followers held looked more like some unlikely jerky blackened by frost and age. But then came more of the hymnal wine, wherein most prayers are answered, and Ralph ate and drank and believed.
He was reminded of other breakfasts—of the confections of coffee and chocolate of which Helen was fond before she’d decided that she should only drink lemon juice or hot water for the sake of her thin frame. He remembered frothily swirled spirals of steam and scent filling the cool morning silence as they both studied their separate daily papers. He heard the tink of spoons against monogrammed porcelain. Glancing at her across battlefields of white cloth set with crystal emplacements of condiment, he saw that the children were also with them today for breakfast. He struck his spoon more loudly in the hope that it might catch their attention. He was dimly aware that he was dying, and felt that he owed them some sort of apology before he did.
The Beetle Lady shook him. ‘No, no. Not death—not sleep. Now listen, listen… I’ve been to the place which is called Invercombe, where the thunder beckoned. Yes, there is darkness, but beyond that… Ah, beyond that…’ Her eyes whitened. ‘Beyond that… She will lead … Listen …’
Ralph listened. Was that thunder? Was it wind? Was it guns?
Ma-ri-on.
Soon, although he’d as happily have stayed here as anywhere, it would be time to move on. He made the effort to hitch himself up from beside the dying fire. He swayed with hunger, weariness, illness and loss of sleep. He believed the Beetle Lady when she talked of Marion Price in the same way that she talked of the lost days of myth, and of a different Einfell, and of Goldenwhite’s ragged army.
He hobbled around dead trees and the fallen bodies of the still sleeping. The followers had become a sort of procession, a safety of mixed numbers and madnesses. Day by day they grew. An increasing number of soldiers had joined their company, and there were familiar morning rituals and ablutions: gun-and-harness jingle; the scrape of shovels; the scratch of heads; the curse-and-hawk-and-spit. These deserters from the East and West fitted together so easily they might never have been separated, and Ralph wondered if any of them recognised him, although, un-uniformed and hollowed-out and bearded as he now was, he doubted it.
‘Ralph Meynell?’
He stopped, turned. Someone neither quite civilian nor military was squatting on the ground. They wore a cap and a loose grey coat, and their boots, or what remained of them, lay beside their bare feet. Somewhat ruefully, they had been kneading their blistered and frostbitten toes. Oddly enough, it was those toes, and in particular their upward turn rather than anything else about her appearance, which made Ralph Meynell recognise the person he seemed to be seeing. But then, it was just as the Beetle Lady had long been saying. For where else but here, amid these followers and in this place, would you expect to find Marion Price?
X
THE POWER WAS DOWN and had been that way since long before dawn, and the fine house, a mixture of styles and Ages, which had been requisitioned as Headquarters for the First and Second Eastern Armies over which Alice, in the matter of a few shifterms and by divers means, had assumed almost total control, was seepingly cold. The spells which had once been cast to keep up the plaster which frothed across the extravagant ceilings were failing. You could hear the crashes like cannon-fire each night as more of it collapsed. What furniture remained in the desolate rooms was crooked and unstable. The plumbing had failed, to be replaced by hosepipes, buckets and standpipes. The carpets squelched. The silk wallpapers were sloughing from the walls. In her previous visits to the front, she had always been aware of grey, grim military utility, but living amongst it was something else entirely.
Climbing out from her fold-up bed which lay in the clotted gloom cast by the huge red four-poster which was to
o damp to be inhabited, she winced, and waited for her head to stop spinning. The air swished about her. Jungle fronds of damp climbed the walls, greyly exploring the interstices of stone and wood and plaster. A shadow, a madly haired extension of the grainy light, she crept across the loosely carpeted floor. With a sag and a stagger, her portmanteau opened. Many of the jars were stuffed in places where they didn’t quite fit, or had crusted and jauntily angled lids. Pages and cuttings from her notebook had loosened to line the dim bottom like the fallen leaves of her own personal autumn. One day, Alice told herself, she would give the whole thing a proper clear-out. But in truth she had come to like the loose, powdery and jangling sense of disorder it now gave off. It was all hers, an entire spinning world, and here, at the heart of it, the star which they all orbited: a small, bright chalice of aether, which brightened still further as she lifted it out. The hissing in her head grew much stronger as well. The sense, the song, of the aether infused her. Almost regretfully, she laid it down on the nearby dressing table, then rummaged for the other preparations and powders she required to feed her small retort. She struck a match, lit the flame of the spirit, which fluttered, a rag of dark, against the aether’s continuing flare. Opening the lid of her gramophone’s silent, lacquered box, she laid the needle in mid-track. She slid the turntable forward with the tips of her fingers. A faint roar. Slid it back. A dim clamour of voices, more of the song …
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