Black Feathers Page 5

  No one speaks, but Megan and her parents nod. Amu and Apa have calmed down enough to each place a protective, forgiving arm around Megan, and together they walk slowly home from the river bank where so much love has been made, so much that it became the most beautiful thing in her parents’ lives and the thing, Megan knows, they believe they are about to lose.

  That night, her small but swelling breasts ache, her belly knots and tightens. She bleeds for the first time. Amu brings her a bundle of moon cloths, quietly explaining their use. As to the blood and its significance, Megan has been expecting it. Pain is not the only sensation in the depths of her belly, there is a flutter there – excitement and expectation.

  May 2004

  The door to Judith’s bedroom opened a fraction and a face, lily-pale in a thin bar of moonlight, appeared there. Lying on her right side facing the doorway, she watched through a tiny crack in her eyelids as Gordon pushed silently into the room. She felt a warm flush of anticipation and pride knowing she was his secret protector.

  The door hinge creaked and Gordon froze. Judith saw the look of terror there. If Mum and Dad discovered him here, his nocturnal visits would end. Then what would he do when the nightmares came?

  She’d loved him with a fierce loyalty the moment she’d seen his wrinkled, newborn skin and gentle grey eyes. So different to the feelings she had for Angela. Judith tested the love in her mind, especially on nights like this when Gordon came to her for comfort. She tried to quantify it, define it. If Angela was ever hurt or killed, Judith knew she would be sad. She would weep over her injury or loss. Without Angela, she was unguarded against the ways of the world. She would weep also because when they weren’t arguing and when Angela wasn’t being cruel or dismissive, they had a lot of fun. These things were enough to qualify as love.

  With Gordon, her love was different. She couldn’t have the same kind of fun with Gordon. With six years between them, playing with him was always a step backwards; the games themselves quiet, dramatic fantasies. She played with him because she knew he wasn’t always happy playing alone, and his happiness was essential for her own. If anything bad ever happened to Gordon, Judith wasn’t sure what she would do. She knew if someone hurt him she would calmly inflict upon them the greatest pain she knew how to give. Merely imagining that someone might seek to injure him made her fists clench beneath the bedclothes. And if he died, if she lost him, she knew all she would want would be to die too, to follow him to wherever it was that death took you.

  She watched him, petrified halfway through the door. When no one responded to the creaking of the hinge, Gordon regained his courage and crept into her room.

  He left it ajar so he could slip away through the same gap before anyone else stirred. So stealthy had he become that Judith often woke to find him in her bed, clutching her but already asleep. He came whenever he had nightmares, at least once a week, often more. She would take hold of his hand and squeeze it tight to let him know he was safe before returning to sleep. When she woke in the mornings he was always gone.

  He approached now making no sound at all. If she hadn’t been awake already, observing him through slit lids, she wouldn’t have known he was there until his small, wiry arms had encircled her and his tight fingers had clutched her nightdress in a grip that would not relent until he left. She watched his eyes, wide and frightened, his pupils so dilated their blackness almost eclipsed the grey of his irises, watched his forehead crease with concentration as he used every muscle to move silently.

  She lifted up the covers to let him see she was awake. His frown cleared and she saw the relief on his face, his fear gone in an instant. With great care, he climbed in beside her. She drew him close and tight. With an arm wrapped over him, she engulfed him in a warm cocoon. He pushed against her as hard as he could, expelling all the space between them, pressing his cold feet between her ankles.

  The first time it had happened was almost two years before, when he’d had his first bad dream. Judith heard him walking down the hallway to their parents’ bedroom, sniffing and sobbing as he went. She knew he must have tried to get in with Mum and Dad but neither of them wanted him in their bed. Mum had taken Gordon back to his room and whispered soothing words to him for five minutes before going back to sleep with Dad. It didn’t do any good. Long after Mum had left him, Judith could hear Gordon weeping, even though he’d tried to stifle it in his pillow. She’d hated her parents for that, especially her mum. Judith had been the one to slip from her warm duvet and collect him that night. His small hand in hers, they had walked back across the hall. She’d climbed into bed and he had followed, hugging her so tight she thought he’d never sleep.

  “Any time you’re scared or have a bad dream you can come. But don’t ever, ever tell anyone, Gordon,” she’d whispered. “OK?”

  “OK.”

  Now, here he was again, holding tight but already asleep and Judith, happy to be a shield against the dark of his own little mind, slept too.

  In the morning he was gone.

  7

  The knocking is soft, almost surreptitious. Heather Maurice glances at her husband, a flash of worry passing over her face before he stands to open the front door.

  “Mr Keeper,” says Fulton, frowning. “I’m afraid you’ve missed Megan. She’s out berry-picking with Sally Balston and the Frewin boy.”

  “I know,” says Mr Keeper. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Heather dries her hands on her apron and comes to her husband’s side.

  “What is it?” she asks. “What’s the matter?”

  Mr Keeper glances over his shoulder. Already, a couple of neighbours have taken an interest in his presence. He gestures towards the table and whispers:

  “It might be better if we talk on the warm side of the door.”

  The Maurices stand back and let Mr Keeper pass. He sits at their table and loads his pipe. Fulton Maurice, usually placid, fidgets. Heather places her hand on his sizable forearm. Mr Keeper doesn’t seem to notice. He lights up, takes a deep breath and clouds the kitchen with smoke in a single exhalation.

  “There’s something I couldn’t tell you with Megan listening. Something that would make all this much harder for her.”

  Heather’s brow creases and she squeezes her husband’s arm. Fulton Maurice places his massive hand over hers, engulfing it. Mr Keeper leans towards them, his face solemn but kind.

  “It’s nothing bad, you understand. But it is so very important and you must swear to me that you will never mention it to her – whether she walks the Black Feathered Path or not.” He searches their eyes. “Can you do this?”

  Fulton Maurice nods but Heather is thin-lipped. When she speaks her voice is unsteady.

  “You’re asking a great deal of us already, Mr Keeper. And a lot more of our Megan. She’s our only child and still just a girl. I’m not sure any of this is right for her. Or for us.”

  Mr Keeper’s face becomes grave. Fulton Maurice shifts in his chair and looks away.

  “This isn’t simply about you,” says Mr Keeper. “It isn’t even about Megan. It concerns all of us. It concerns the land. And Megan is not so young as you wish to think. She is, even now, becoming a young woman and I can tell you, with the Earth Amu as my witness, that without Megan our future will be uncertain at best. The Crowman wants her – he’s made that plain enough – and now it’s up to her to decide what’s right.” Mr Keeper takes a pull on his pipe and looks out through the wind-eye beside the front door, staring far beyond the cottages on the other side of the track. When he looks back, as though returning from some terrible distance, neither of the Maurices can hold his gaze. “I can’t make Megan’s choice for her and I wouldn’t want to, but can I at least rely on your silence? You must believe me when I say that much rests on your answer.”

  Heather sighs and leans against Fulton’s shoulder.

  “We’re her parents,” she says. “We can’t help but be afraid for her.”

  Mr Keeper nods.

  �
��I know.”

  Heather turns to her husband. Their eyes meet and, in time, Fulton Maurice speaks.

  “We need to trust in the way of things, Heather. Strikes me none of this is an accident.” He looks at Mr Keeper. “You have my word I’ll say nothing to Megan.”

  Heather sits straight again.

  “And you have mine.”

  “I thank you both.” Mr Keeper put a hand inside his boiler suit. “There’s something you need to see.” He draws out a large, flat leather pouch which he lays on the table. Its ruby-dark surface has been polished smooth by years of handling and its edges are beginning to fray and crumble. With fingers roughened and wrinkled by constant foraging, Mr Keeper gently flips the pouch open. Inside is a pocket. He reaches for it and hesitates. Instead, he taps out his pipe and refills it.

  “I need to tell you a story first.”

  “There was one Keeper who lived in the time when the Crowman walked this land. Just one. He remains the only person to ever meet the Crowman face to face – to be touched by his wings – and survive. The encounter almost killed him, left him crippled and blind. But the reward was great. The Crowman gave him new eyes with which he could see deep into the Weave. It was the gift of prophecy and it made him the first in our line. The Rag Man was his name.

  “Now, every Keeper can see a little way into the Weave but the Rag Man saw everything. He saw us. And I think he saw Megan.

  “In all the generations since the Black Dawn, there has never been a female Keeper. The Crowman has shown himself to one boy after another and their task remains unchanged. To tell the story. To keep it alive by journeying through the Weave and setting down the tale. This process keeps us all in touch with the Crowman. It keeps him alive inside us and that, in turn, keeps the land alive. But every Keeper so far has been fallible, even I. The risk always remains that one of us will journey in error and return with the story only half told. The farther away in time we travel from the days of the Crowman, the more likely that is to happen. Already, it may be that the story is not correct in all its facets. Already we may be forgetting the Crowman’s true nature and how he links us to the Earth.

  “But the Rag Man, he saw a girl in the Weave, generations in his future, when the Black Dawn was only a distant memory. The first and only female Keeper. He saw, too, that this girl would be the last Keeper. Either she would journey and rediscover the tale in its entirety, thereby keeping us united with the land for all time, or she would journey and fail. The story of the Crowman would be lost and our connection to the Earth severed as it was before the Black Dawn. Only this time, if that bond is cut, it will be final. Within a generation or two, all of us will be done for. The Earth Amu will die and the light from Father Sky will be snuffed out. For our lives and the life of the world are as one. We share the same destiny.”

  Mr Keeper pauses to reload and relight his pipe. Heather and Fulton Maurice sit, silent and still. Keeper slips his finger inside the pocket of the leather pouch and slides out a piece of paper. It is yellowed and its edges are nibbled and torn with wear. A pattern of thin, perfectly parallel blue lines covers its surface and between these, in a style too twisted to be readable, is a mass of spiky scrawl, apparently written in great haste.

  Megan’s parents lean forwards and frown over the handwriting.

  “I know,” says Mr Keeper. “Impossible to decipher without several years of study under your belt.” He grins. “Which, fortunately, I have. This, as far as we know, is the Rag Man’s only surviving inscription. There may be others but they have never been found. These lines are a prophecy, somewhat fevered, but nonetheless a vision of the future – the one we now occupy, if my instincts are correct.”

  He places the page in front of him on the kitchen table and is silent for a few moments before beginning to speak:

  be watchful for an innocent

  guided by a black feather

  chosen in the shadow of trees

  in a time of harvest

  in an era of plenty

  fair of face and hair

  yet her name is black

  this is the keeper of keepers

  in whose journey the land may live or die

  the boy cannot exist without the girl

  without the teller, there can be no tale

  Heather Maurice claps her hands with relief.

  “Well that settles it, Mr Keeper. It can’t be our Megan. Her name isn’t Black!” She looks to her husband for support but his face is vacant. Mr Keeper shrugs with a resigned smile. “Fulton,” she says. “Make Mr Keeper understand. It’s all been a mistake.”

  “I think Mr Keeper may be right.”

  “How can he be right? She’s not named Black.”

  Fulton sighs, his enormous frame shrinking.

  “Maurice is a very old name. It doesn’t mean anything now, but a long time ago it meant dark-skinned or black. I’m sorry, Heather. When I heard those words, my skin turned to gooseflesh. I don’t know if Megan has the strength to–”

  Mr Keeper holds up a hand.

  “Please. I know it’s distressing.” He slips the ancient sheet of jagged script back into its pocket and closes the pouch, before returning it to his boiler suit. “There’s nothing can be done right now. These are only words – from a time none of us can remember. They could be wrong. They may not even have come from the hand of the Rag Man.” He leans towards the Maurices. “None of this is set. Not yet. But I couldn’t let the matter go any further without telling you everything.” He pushes his chair back from the table and stands, suddenly cheerful. “Let us wait and see what Megan decides. Let us see what rises inside her. One thing, at least, is clear, though – the Rag Man was very specific. She must be a girl. Still a child. If Megan is the one, her walking of the path must be swift – not years, as was my initiation, but months. I pray she decides soon.”

  October 2005

  Sophie cleared the paper plates and discarded party hats, the leavings of cake and fruit jelly from the waterproof tablecloth; all the colours seeming dull in the cloud-choked October light. The kitchen was silent now, vacuous and forlorn in the wake of ten small children and their mothers. Streamers hung, pinned to the beams and thrown over the lights in the ceiling, some vague current of air animating them, giving rise to papery whispers.

  A blue candle in the shape of the number 5 lay extinguished and partially burned in the centre of the table. Sophie lifted it, turned it in her hands for long moments before wrapping it in a paper bag. She took it to the bureau in the living room and unlocked the hinged writing panel with a key from a small vase on the mantelpiece. She placed the candle beside its four predecessors and a collection of other tiny relics – a lock of his hair, cut the very night he was born; several silky crow feathers; an infantile drawing of a ragged bird, in black crayon; the rattle Louis had made for him; his first pair of woollen booties. There were other mementos – lucky pennies and corks saved from champagne bottles and cards of congratulation – all relating to Gordon.

  There was no glow of nostalgia around these artefacts, merely a dark aura. Sophie ached, not with loss, but for something none of the family had had in the five years since Gordon was born: light hearts. They’d birthed him into an afflicted world. It was almost as if Gordon had brought its troubles with him: the changes in the climate and increased solar activity, the creeping totalitarianism of government, the epidemics and poverty, the undercurrent of fear. This was the joyless era Gordon would live through – if he survived. If any of them did.

  In one of the bureau’s hidden compartments was a growing collection of letters, sketches and poetry. The penmanship and craft of strangers. Sometimes they arrived in the post. Sometimes they were delivered by hand, or left anonymously on the mat outside the front door. Louis once had a tiny wooden carving of a scarecrow, about the size of a chess pawn, pressed into his hand by a crazed-looking vagrant outside Waterloo Station in London. On one of her shopping trips to Bristol with Amelia Porter when Gordon was two years ol
d, a woman in the street had started screaming and pointing at Gordon’s pushchair.

  “He’s coming, you stupid bitch. Open your eyes. Black Jack’s coming to damn us all.”

  The woman had dropped her own shopping in the road and run towards them, eyes suddenly wild, hair flying, only to be tackled at the last possible moment by an elderly ex-serviceman who’d witnessed the whole incident.

  Everything about that day had been wrong – even before the lunatic woman made her lunge for Gordon. It was the first time Sophie had really noticed how tainted everything looked, the first time she’d admitted to herself that her family was living through dark times. Shop fronts were boarded up even in the most prosperous parts of the city, the graffiti covering them not merely profane but hallucinatory and prophetic. Each time she opened the bureau, memories from that day resurfaced, especially the defacing of derelict buildings and chipboarded windows: scrawled murals of bloody combat overseen by a screaming black angel and the strange poetry that accompanied the images. All of this so similar to the tokens which now filled the writing bureau’s secret compartment.

  Police had been everywhere but none had come to help them. Instead, they loitered in groups on street corners or in alleys, looking more like gang members than protectors of the public. Among these menacing coteries, she had glimpsed for the first time figures in long grey coats and broad-brimmed hats – now the Ward were everywhere. Bristol had smelled faintly of excrement that morning, the occasional waft making Sophie and Amelia wrinkle their noses. A few days later, following record rainfall in the South West, the sewers had backed up and Bristol suffered an outbreak of typhoid.

  Sophie touched the compartment in the bureau, almost needing to check that the collection of strange gifts was real. But of course it was. She knew what she would see if she opened that cleverly crafted recess in the wood – what she and Louis privately referred to as the Crowman’s coffer. Years of stored-up evidence that there was something different about her pale, sensitive little boy. Something strange. Something foreshadowed. Sophie drew her fingertips away, squeezing back tears of apprehension and fear. She folded the writing bureau’s panel shut, locked it and replaced the key in its vase. Turning back towards the hallway, she screamed, her hands flying to her mouth.