Rampage! (15 page)

The mixture darkened to a deep purple. It stained the sides of the pot as she stirred, and now, listening to the soft chink of her mixing, she felt the cold knot of fear in her stomach start to untangle, knowing that the concoction was the first step in bringing her father back to her.

Medea handed her a large pair of scissors and nodded at the feathers. Understanding, Rose snipped off the singed tendrils and stirred them into the mixture while Medea snapped a couple of twigs from a branch of grey
wood, set them beneath a small tripod and flicked them with her fingers so that they started to smoulder.

Biting her lip, Rose set the pot on top of the flame.

‘Now look at the incantation,' said Medea, nodding back at the book. ‘You'll need to recite it turning widdershins.'

‘
Widder
-what?' said Rose.

‘Widdershins,' said Medea. ‘It means anticlockwise. Magic, you see, needs movement.'

Magic needs movement.

The words echoed uncomfortably inside her mind and Rose swallowed hard, remembering how Hex had whispered the very same thing to her and Alex, back in the theatre, back when Medea was about to, to …

‘Come along now, Rose,' said Medea, narrowing her eyes. ‘Try the spell.'

‘Hecate! Mistress of the moon
,' began Rose, turning to the left. The words felt strange and dangerous in her mouth.

‘Spin back the hands of time,
' prompted Medea.

‘Spin back the hands of time,'
repeated Rose, now catching sight of a trail of blue smoke that was snaking out of the bowl and rising towards the roof.

There was a sudden bang like a gun being fired. Smoke funnelled up through the hole in the roof. The liquid spattered and boiled.

‘Is it ready?' said Rose, startled by the long, orange flames licking around the bowl like tongues.

‘The potion is,' said Medea, ‘but that's only half of this spell.'

She turned and walked over to her steamer trunk, flicked a large feathered headdress off its lid and opened it up. ‘To work, it needs the most important thing of all.'

‘Something to power it?' said Rose, remembering what the sorceress had told her in the night.

She watched as Medea reached down into the layers of clothes to pull something out, something that glinted in the sunshine now streaming into the hut.

‘Exactly!' said Medea, holding what Rose could now see was a wide golden cuff up to the light. ‘Just like cooking needs an oven to bake cake mixture into a cake, potions need something to turn them into working spells.' Smiling, she walked back and handed it to Rose. ‘Take a look at this.'

Rose turned the cuff over in her hand. Heavy and gleaming, its surface was engraved with pictures of people with the heads of crocodiles and falcons.

‘It belonged to Tutankhamun,' said the sorceress, her eyes growing darker as she stared at it.

Rose felt her fingers tremble around the cuff. ‘
The
Tutankhamun?'

Medea nodded.

Rose brought it closer and, peering hard, made out a couple of spindly-legged birds, ibises who trailed a ribbon of hieroglyphics between them like a banner, and,
blinking, she watched as the pictograms melted into words that she could read.

‘To Osiris in the West,' she whispered.

Rose stared down at the glittering gold, her mind flitting back to the exhibition her parents had dragged her to, years ago, when the Museum of Cairo had allowed its treasures to go on display in London. Osiris was an Egyptian god – that was it – and an important one at that, although she couldn't remember what sort of god he was. She frowned, frustrated, fleetingly sensing a darker thought that fluttered through her memory and vanished as Medea spoke again.

‘Remarkable, isn't it?' she said. ‘It was taken from his tomb in the Valley of the Kings back in 1922,' said Medea.

Rose's mind returned to the exhibition. How she'd queued, seven years old, for hours with her parents in the rain. How she'd pleaded, sulky and wet, to go to the gift shop instead. Right up until she'd seen the pharaoh's dazzling death mask, twinkling in its bulletproof glass case, criss-crossed by red security lights and surrounded by dour-faced guards.

‘It must be priceless,' breathed Rose.

‘It certainly is,' said Medea lightly. ‘It'd be worth millions of pounds to a collector or museum, but its value in money is nothing, Rose, nothing compared to what it can actually do for people like us.'

‘People like
us
?' said Rose, uncomfortably.

‘It's the power behind sorcery,' said Medea. ‘The heat for the cake, Rose.'

‘Gold?' Rose felt faintly disappointed.

‘Not just any gold,' said Medea. ‘It has to be truly remarkable.' The sorceress's eyes became glazed as she went on. ‘Special and unique. Gold that has inspired men, captured men's imaginations. Gold that has changed the course of history.' The sorceress leaned over and stroked the edge of the gold as though it were the tiny hand of a newborn baby. ‘How does it feel, Rose?'

Rose shrugged, confused by the question.

‘Heavy?'

‘What else?' Rose waited for a few moments before looking up at Medea.

‘Warm?'

‘That's right.' The sorceress's eyes grew darker. ‘Like any metal, gold will draw the heat from your skin, but this gold,
our
gold, has drawn on something far more potent.' Medea plucked the cuff from Rose's palm and slipped it around her own wrist. ‘Did you know,' said Medea, holding her arm out in front of her to admire the look of the cuff against her milky skin, ‘that Tutankhamun was only ten years old when he took the throne of Egypt and yet his people revered him like a god?'

Rose watched as Medea turned her wrist as gracefully as a ballerina. ‘According to the pictures inside the tomb, he wore so much gold that he shone like the sun and his people fell to their knees, dazzled. Can you imagine the wonder he inspired?'

For a moment Medea's face became quite still, transfixed by the sunlight dancing over the surface of the gold
and Rose nodded, casting her mind back to the exhibition and a dimly lit side room, filled with old black-and-white photographs of Tutankhamun's tomb, hidden for three thousand years in a valley in the desert. She recalled her mother's face, pink with excitement, as she'd described the dead king's treasure room, shimmering like a gigantic jewellery box. Golden chariots and thrones, carved boxes and pots spilling over with crowns and coins, necklaces and bracelets, cuffs and golden ankhs; emeralds, sapphires, rubies, diamonds lay scattered underfoot; so much that crate after crate after crate had been needed to empty the treasure and wheel it away, month after month, over narrow, makeshift train-tracks to the Nile.

‘All that power,' whispered Rose.

‘All that love,' corrected Medea. ‘Surrounding him as surely as the air he breathed, with gold like this right at its centre.'

‘So, you're saying that the gold drew that sort of power into itself?'

‘That's right,' nodded Medea. ‘Feeding on it, drawing it deeper and deeper into itself until its very molecules were bursting with power.'

Feeding? Molecules bursting with power? Rose stared at the cuff, beginning to feel faintly silly. It was a funny way to talk about gold, she decided. After all, it was hardly alive, was it? Yet the way Medea had described it now made her think of a greedy aphid sucking the goodness from a flower stem.

‘The Fleece was just the same,' continued Medea, her
voice becoming dreamy. ‘Kings from all over the ancient world lusted after it, sending their bravest men to try and steal it.' Suddenly Medea's face stiffened. ‘Even my own father became utterly besotted by it, standing in front of it, day after day, staring at it, adoring it.'

‘And all that time ––'

‘Like the pharaoh's gold, it was gaining power,' finished Medea. ‘Power that we can unleash. Watch!'

Taking a pair of tongs from the table, Medea lifted the bowl from the heat and dribbled a few drops of the potion onto the table, where it sizzled and pooled. Then she dipped the edge of the bangle into it and closed her eyes.

Her face became completely still, rigid with concentration, as a low moan filled the hut. Suddenly a flurry of white sparks exploded from the table and raced along its edge, trailing ribbons of blue and green smoke. There was a deafening crack and the edge of the table splintered outwards to reveal a gnarled tree branch in the gap. Rose stared, open-mouthed, as the branch grew before her eyes, feathering into smaller branches and twigs, each clustered with green leaves, unfurling like tiny fists as she watched.

‘Back the way it was,' said Medea, her voice little more than a whisper.

Rose gaped. Even though she didn't understand all that stuff about gold molecules being infused with power, she couldn't deny what she saw in front of her. Or felt. Reaching out, she closed her hand around a cluster of new leaves, soft and real beneath her fingertips. She stared
at the cuff and the fizz of purple bubbles dribbling over its edge, dumbfounded. Was that what made magic so special in the first place? The way you couldn't explain it away easily? The way you felt you were half-mad for even trying to bend your mind around it?

‘Your turn now,' said Medea, setting the cuff down on the table between them.

Wordlessly, Rose quickly lifted one side of the bell jar up and drizzled the liquid on to the platform. The butterfly bashed against the top of the glass, as furiously as her mind, now bursting with questions. Maybe she just wasn't magical enough herself yet to understand? Maybe she was like those astonished Victorians huddled round-eyed around a glass bulb glowing with electricity, lighting up a darkened room?

‘Concentrate,' said Medea gently. ‘Now, as you use the bangle, force your mind onto an image of what you want the spell to do. You have to make the picture bright, like a photograph in your mind.'

Biting her lip, Rose picked up the bangle and quickly lifted the glass a second time, dipping it into the pool. A gasp of silver smoke spiralled into the air, sending the butterfly toppling down. It landed and teetered sideways, its legs sinking into the potion. Around it, the smoke thickened, rising like a miniature bank of fog.

‘See what you want to happen in your mind!' commanded Medea.

Scrunching her eyes tight shut, Rose imagined the butterfly bringing its blue wings together over its back.
She saw their brown undersides fold gently down, as fragile as origami, as the butterfly sank on to its spindly legs, nestling its head as the potion seeped over it, enveloping it like a sheath. A sheath that became brown and translucent. Feeling her mind grow ever stiller, she watched it turn green. A moment later, she envisioned movement beneath its surface, a wiggling of tiny feet against its elastic sides. Finally, the sheath peeled away, and a fat brown caterpillar wobbled out.

Which was when Medea squealed with delight.

Her concentration shattered, Rose flung down the bangle and flicked open her eyes, astounded to see a caterpillar – a real, live, wriggling, wibbly-wobbly caterpillar – squirming around inside the base of the dome.

‘I did it!' shouted Rose.

‘What did I tell you!' exclaimed Medea, throwing her arms around Rose's shoulders. ‘You're a natural!'

Rose felt like leaping for joy at Medea's praise. She felt like dancing around the hut. She'd done it, she'd actually, truly done it. Turned a living, breathing, flapping butterfly back into its caterpillar. She laughed out loud, unable to stop herself from imagining her father
reset
to the way he was back in London: big and broad and laughing, laughing, not lost, and the fogginess gone from his eyes, wrapping his arms about her in a bear hug. Laughing, she lifted the dome and scooped the caterpillar into her hands, feeling its furry body tumble around her palm. Then, she turned and hurried out through the door, setting it free on the dusty ground. A group of
children ran over to see what it was and Rose laughed with them as they pointed and giggled.

Stepping back into the hut, she felt as though her heart would burst with impatience. In fact, she was already so busy imagining how her father's voice would sound the first time he said her name again that she didn't notice the squeals of the children outside as a swooping, white bird dived into their midst and snatched up the caterpillar. Nor did she see it flap past the window, the squirming creature trapped in its vicious sword-like beak, as it wheeled away into the trees. And even if she had, not being a bird-expert, she'd hardly have realised that it was a long-necked egret, rarely seen anywhere but on the river diving for fish and never, ever in the village.

But Medea certainly saw it.

And I'm afraid it gave her a nasty little thrill as she watched Rose sit back down at the table.

‘So,' gasped Rose, ‘how soon will I be able to cure my dad?' She picked up the bangle. ‘Can't I just use this on the rest of the potion?'

Medea shook her head. ‘I'm afraid there's not enough gold there to make the change permanent.'

‘Not enough gold?' Rose shook her head, puzzled.

‘Take a closer look at the bangle. See what happens when we use it.'

Rose brought the cuff closer, shocked to see that the engravings of the falcon-and crocodile-headed gods were blurrier against the sheen of the metal, the detail of their
feathers and beaks and teeth rubbed out. Even the ibises, so stark and angular before, looked as soft as swans.

‘You see, every time it powers magic,' explained Medea, plucking the cuff from Rose's fingers and drawing it to her chest, ‘gold disappears. There isn't enough here to cure your father. And besides,' she added, tightening her grasp on it, ‘it's the very last piece of gold I have. We'll need it in order to find more.'