Black Feathers (35 page)

The trees shrink to the size of small shrubs, gnarled and twisted, spines broken, limbs bending back on each other. Between them the ground has turned to grey dust. It kicks up around her feet as she walks, finer than sand.

There’s nothing out here.

To her right the river has dropped away out of sight. Beyond it runs a ridge, the same ridge she and Mr Kee–

Megan stops dead still, a small storm of dust rolling on ahead of her feet before settling. She is on a plateau which has shielded her from seeing what lies ahead, but she has an idea of how far she has walked and she knows what she and Mr Keeper saw from the ridge. Putting the shape of the land together in her mind, she knows it’s more than possible that Bodbran has sent her to a place she hoped only ever to observe from a distance.

No.

I don’t know maps. I must be wrong.

She doesn’t move. She can’t.

Far away, Gordon heard rumbling. He sat up and reached for his knife.

Could the Ward have tracked him down to this place? He listened. The rumble’s tone was constant, no strains or gear changes. Not four-wheel drives, then.

The sound had enough power behind it to suggest a squadron of aircraft. Perhaps the wars he’d dreamed of had started and these were the bombers. He moved to the cave entrance but the rumbling didn’t seem to come from above. That made it unlikely to be thunder, even though there’d been enough storms to warrant it. He glanced out. The sky was uniformly grey and drab, no flashes of lightning anywhere.

The rumble became a vibration he could feel through his legs and buttocks. He sprang to his feet.

Please. Don’t let this be what I think it is.

The rumbling increased in volume. The sound came from all around him. The juddering travelled up his legs and his kneecaps twitched. He threw his arms out for balance but it did no good. The juddering became shaking. The noise in his head was like thunder now, except that it wouldn’t stop – one mighty, continuous clap. Unable to keep his footing, he fell against the curve of the cave wall, arms still outstretched, fingers clutching the stone.

The ground bucked beneath him, bumping him into the air as though he was rebounding from a trampoline. The embers of the fire began to scatter. Tumbling coals of burning wood spread out in all directions. Surprised by a sudden kick of movement from the left, Gordon fell onto his face and slid towards the scorching ashes. It was more through luck than skill that Gordon managed to regain his footing.

Before the fire could spread too far across the cave he crouched and hoisted a double handful of coals out of the cave mouth. They hissed in the rain before they even hit the ground and Gordon held his hands in the downpour for a moment to douse the heat. Frantic now, he chased the scattering fire, picking up burning branches and glowing orange embers and tossing them out before they could scald him. A coal lodged between the little and index finger of his left hand long enough to raise smoke from his skin. There wasn’t time to lament the pain. As though bailing water from a sinking boat, Gordon emptied the cave of fire. When it was done, he held his hands into the rain for a few moments but falling debris forced him back inside. Rocks were falling into the ravine.

The shaking caused Gordon and all his equipment to slide into a pile at the centre of the cave. All he could do was lie with his arms outstretched, praying the cave wouldn’t collapse. Stronger quakes, accompanied by deafening booms from deep below the earth, sent him and everything else in the cave three and sometimes four feet off the ground. His ribs, knees and elbows all took punishment but the knocks to his head were the worst. Twice he came down on his chin, rattling his teeth and knocking himself half stupid. Another tremor flipped him over and rapped his ear against the cave floor.

Roaring and shaking, the land entered a frenzy of rage. It sounded as though the planet was tearing itself apart from inside. Gordon prayed to everything he considered holy; all the elements and the creator spirit that formed them, all the creatures and the land they lived upon:

Don’t do this. Give us a chance to prove…

To prove what?

…to prove we care. That we’re still listening. To show you we’re worthy of your abundance.

The hammering upwards of the ground lessened. The massive upthrusts that had thrown him into the air ceased. Now there was just rumbling and shaking, more like a shiver than a convulsion. The sound of underground explosions diminished. There was a sense of settling as the ground fell back into place. Tremors became vibrations, anger subsided like the sound of an engine receding into the distance.

Cease.

Silence. The worst silence.

For all Gordon knew the world outside was dead. Every animal, every person gone. The mountains shattered to rubble and the rivers scattered like droplets. Or perhaps the world had broken apart and he now floated through space on a discarded fragment.

After a few moments he noticed a sound all around him. A whine. It was his own eardrums whistling as they recovered from the auditory assault.

His cave had held. There were no cracks in its walls and none of the falling debris had come through the entrance. Once again he had been saved simply by the luck of being in the right place at the right time. But of course, he now knew, that there was no luck in that. Something was guiding him. Something was protecting him.

And something had answered his prayer – almost instantly. Surely this was proof that he was on the road to the Crowman.

Exhausted and bruised. Gordon lay amid the tangle of his belongings. And, though the world all around him was silent and still, his whole body vibrated like live cable.

Megan walks down the gentle, rocky slope from the highest point of the plateau, and the city sprawls grey, shattered and scorched before her. The strange line on the map, the only feature crossing the uncharted area, is formed by the giant skeletal structures she saw on the way from Beckby village to Shep Afon.

Nothing grows in the city. Nothing grows around it. Megan approaches across a dusty expanse of what she knows is
dead
land. Here, even the bright sun can do nothing to raise colour from the drab destruction. Some yards from the first broken structure she halts.

She could still turn back or merely try to escape across the river. She could climb the ridge on the other side and either wait for Mr Keeper or go back to Shep Afon’s hub to find him. Or she could just journey home to the warmth of Amu’s kitchen and the strong arms of her father. They would protect her. She could forget all this nonsense about the Crowman and walking the Black Feathered Path. She could go back and get on with being what she was before. A village girl who knew nothing about the world except what she’d learned in an ordinary school. No magic, no visions, no weaving of night and day, past and present. No more writing in the book. She would swim in the river and take long walks and…

I can never do any of that again. I’ve changed, and I can’t undo any of this.

But it isn’t that which makes her body move forwards into the city. It’s the fact that she really wants to know everything there is to know. She wants the full story. She wants to know what happens to the boy. She knows it is important, not just for her but for everyone, that she discovers the rest of his history and record it in the book. It is not the fear that drives her forwards, it is the knowledge that there are two ways of doing things, the right way and the wrong way. One way she can be proud of even if she fails, the other will be a source of shame forever. Yet even that isn’t the final reason.

The final reason is that she knows this is what she was born to do.

Everything had changed and Gordon supposed it might be changed forever.

Outside his cave the once-rocky ground was covered by a layer of mud, the fallen soil from above the ravine now a quagmire. Already the water was draining down through this mud, down into the sandstone of the ravine’s floor. With the calming of the tremors had come the end of the rain, at least for a while. A soft blackish crust covered the earth.

Gordon stood naked in the cave mouth, a hand on each side. Fear and excitement churned his guts. Outside was a new world, changed by the wrath of the Earth Mother and the sadness of the Great Spirit. He knew both these forces existed because he saw them in everything around him, and always had. It was only now that he could accept the words to name them, knowing those words were correct.

His ears whined – sirens and static. The sound of dead technology, a television with no signal, a radio transmitting nothing but hiss. It was the echo of the explosion that began the universe or the sound which preceded it, the first breath of life or the whisper of command which conjured all from nought. Power hummed in the union between Gordon’s palms and the lip of the cave. The air outside sang with potential and destruction. His head ached with the noise, his guts fluttered, his penis thumped to the pulse of his heart, the skin of it so stretched and tight he thought it might split.

He stepped up and out of the cave, his feet sinking into the velvet mud. It forced its way up between his toes. The pull of the earth was so strong he fell to his hands and knees. The world spun and he vomited in one single spasm. His stomach tightened like a mollusc under threat until it felt like a walnut. The contraction lasted for several seconds, during which he couldn’t breathe. First came food, entirely undigested lumps of rabbit. Then watery mucus and finally bright green, tangy bile. Finally the contraction ended and he drew breath like a fish released from a fisherman’s net.

A second cramp came, this time in his bowel. Every inch of his gut contracted to the fineness of wire. More shit than he believed himself able to contain spewed from his rear and this time he was able to scream as it left him, again in a single, agonising clench.

When it was over he crawled away from the mess, his hands and knees carving troughs in the mud until he reached the trees where he’d snared so many rabbits. His penis still burned and beat, more the turgid throb of a pustule than an organ of sex. His third contraction began as a stuttering twitch in his anus and testicles, the muscles there poised between tension and release. The quivering spread down the insides of his thighs and up into his solar plexus. The urge to thrust was overwhelming. His hands and knees swamped by mud, he pumped his hips at the air. The juddering travelled along the centre of his penis in a white heat and a final tightening passed through him.

Am I dying?

He fell on the earth, his penis sinking deep into it, the mud welcoming it, cooling it, wrapping his belly, and again he screamed as he ejected into the grip of the land. His cry too was swallowed as he pressed his face into the mud. Pain and pleasure drained from his groin and thighs and belly, pulled downwards into the muck of the land. He rolled onto his back and looked down at himself. Blood and semen welled from him. Spent, he let his head fall back. He was coated now, a smooth pale boy made dark and heavy by the mire. Too heavy to move.

He lay there for many hours, unable to think as the world drew on him, sucked on him, held him fast. The sense of drainage was terrifying. He feared the Earth would continue to consume him long after he was dead, taking his energy and spirit first, then his flesh and finally his bones, hauling every part of him down into darkness and imprisoning him there forever.

Even his thoughts descended, all the light in his existence taken down into Mother Earth’s secret midnight. Before he could recall an image of his mother and father or of Jude, it was sucked away. Even his tears were pulled back from the corners of his eyes, to be devoured by the hungry land.

The layer of mud over his body dried slowly, forming a crust which insulated him from the cold and acted like a poultice. Where his body made contact with this covering of mud, there was a drawing, a taking away. He was too exhausted to resist any of it and yet the earth did not let him sleep. Conscious but thoughtless, he lay on his back and the hours passed.

Night came down into the ravine and still he did not sleep.

A crack in the mud covering each eye was enough to let him see the sky revealed above him. The clouds were gone now and all night he watched the slow turning of the heavens, the staring of the moon, the dying of particles striking the atmosphere and being denied access. The whine of his eardrums was gone. He could not hear his heartbeat or feel his own breathing. No aeroplane lights blinked their way along flight paths. No satellites passed overhead. No animals snuffled in the undergrowth. No foxes barked into the night. Upon the Earth there was no sound. No movement anywhere.

When the first light of morning came, it too was hushed. Gordon’s ability to think returned. There
was
a new day, that much was obvious, but the world itself was quiet. Gordon found the strength to move and when he sat up, his suit of mud cracked and crumbled from him. He stood and in doing so dislodged much of the caked soil. The rest he brushed and picked away until he was clean – but for a layer of dark dust and the soil dried into his matted hair. He stood on the mud-coated ground of the ravine, listening for signs of something – of life there were none.

He climbed back out of the ravine, following the path that had brought him into it. At the top he found the nearest and best vantage point and surveyed the land around him.

The world, at the very least, was altered.

At worst, she was dead.

The moment Megan steps over the city’s threshold, the sun is swallowed by cloud. The warmth is snatched from the air as dark, malignant clouds spread across the once-bright heavens. Her skin contracts.

At first the ruined structures are well spaced but their sharp edges and flat walls press in on her. The dwellings she is used to are built with easy, natural lines and curves or circles. These houses, if that is what they once were, exude conformity even in ruin. Tumbled walls, collapsed roofs and blind wind-eyes do not rob the city of its order. The basic template is the square, beginning in bricks and blocks, repeated in walls and wind-eyes, echoed in the cubiform structures. The dusty, rubble-strewn ways between these shattered buildings feel like runs, like traps. They give no choice about which direction to take; they seem to lead somewhere specific.

Movement flickers at the limit of her vision. She glances to the right but sees nothing stirring in the dead wreckage where more people than she can count once lived. She thinks she hears the sharp call of a wren but there’s nothing to see. Nothing but a long-deserted dwelling, its neat lines unpicked and unmade by some terrible event, grey and silent like everything else around it.

The idea that someone walks in her footsteps, close enough to grab her hair, increases with every step. She turns often to find nothing but space behind her, no second pair of footprints in dust that has been undisturbed for generations. Not wanting to go a single step farther but knowing she can’t turn back, Megan walks faster to leave the feelings of pursuit behind. The deeper into the city she goes, the more flickers she sees to left and right, but even when she stops and stares, there’s nothing to see but derelict, unoccupied destruction.

Darkness and gloom press down over the city from above, making the surroundings indistinct. Megan sees more shimmers of movement on either side but she hears nothing. All she can do is hurry on.

She begins to come across carriages without horses or oxen to draw them. All of them are furry and flaky with rust. Cars. Inside, their seats are skeletal: springs and frames. Some of the cars contain collapsed piles of bone. She skitters past these, panic rising from her guts to her throat.

The path broadens and the feeling of being trapped eases. But soon the remains of the buildings to either side grow in size until she is hemmed in by towering walls of devastation. As she passes a building that looks mostly untouched by the cataclysm, she hears a clatter and the snap of old timber. She staggers away from the noise. The roof of the building caves in. The walls on which the roof sat sag inwards and fall. The weight of them hitting the upper floor collapses it, and once this pattern is in motion the whole structure implodes. Rubble spews from the lower windows and doors like dry slurry and dust billows outward. The crash is loud enough to make her cover her ears.

Megan realises she has pressed herself against another wall and she staggers away from it now. No structure in this place can be trusted to stay standing. The ghosts of the razed building, roiling clouds of brick and mortar particles exhaled like a final breath, spread out in every direction. Megan hurries away before she is engulfed in the dust. A gritty hiss accompanies the dust cloud but that hiss soon dies, and with its passing the silence of the dead city returns, louder and more threatening than before.