‘We have to be hungry because tonight’s the night of the Hunger Moon, isn’t that right, Jo?’ Red-haired Naomi Banks crouched with her back to Leviathan and looked beseechingly at her friend. As far as she was concerned, Reverend Ransome’s daughter had the Queen’s authority and God’s wisdom, and she’d cheerfully have stepped barefoot in the flames if the other girl had commanded it.
‘That’s right: the Hunger Moon, and the last full moon before spring.’ Conscious of the need to be both stern and benevolent, Joanna imagined her father in his pulpit, and mimicked his stance. In the absence of a lectern, she raised both her arms and said in a chanting voice which had taken some weeks to perfect: ‘We are gathered here on the day of the Hunger Moon to beseech Persephone to break the chains of Hades and bring spring to our beloved land.’ Wondering if she’d struck quite the right note, and a little concerned that she was playing fast and loose with the education her father insisted upon, she glanced quickly at Naomi. Her friend’s cheek was flushed, and her eyes were bright: she pressed a hand to her throat and Joanna, bolstered, went on: ‘Too long have we suffered winter winds! Too long have the dark nights concealed the river’s terrors!’ John, whose determination to be brave was unequal to his dread of the beast probably lurking not a hundred yards away in the water, squealed. His sister frowned, and raised her voice a little. ‘Goddess Persephone, hear us!’ She nodded briskly at her companions, who chorused: ‘Goddess Persephone, hear us!’ They made their supplications to numerous gods, genuflecting deeply at each name; Naomi, whose mother had been of the old religion, crossed herself fervently. ‘And now,’ said Joanna, ‘we have to make a sacrifice,’ and John – who’d never forgotten the story of how Abraham had tethered his son to an altar and got out his carving knife – squealed again, and bolted twice round the fire.
‘Come back, stupid boy,’ said Joanna. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you.’
‘The Essex Serpent might,’ said Naomi, coming at the child with claws, and receiving a look of such censure in return that she flushed, and took John’s hand in hers.
‘We give you the sacrifice of our hunger,’ said Joanna, whose stomach burbled shamefully (she’d concealed breakfast in a napkin and fed it later to the dog, and pleading a headache avoided lunch). ‘We give you the sacrifice of our cold.’ Theatrical, Naomi shivered. ‘We give you the sacrifice of our burning. We give you the sacrifice of our names.’ Joanna paused, forgetting for a moment the ritual she’d prepared, then putting her hand in her pocket took out three pieces of paper. Earlier that day she’d dipped the corner of each sheet in the font of her father’s church, alert to the possibility he’d find her there, and with several lies prepared in her defence. The damp corners had dried in ripples, and as she handed them to her fellow celebrants they crackled audibly. ‘It is necessary for us to commit to the spells,’ she said, sombrely, ‘to give a part of our own nature. We must write our names, and in writing them vow to whichever gods hear us that we give of our own being, in the hope that winter will be gone from the village.’ She examined her words as she said them, and pleased with her phrasing, was struck by a new thought. Stooping to pick up a broken twig, she put it in the fire and let it burn a while, then blowing out the flame scrawled her name on the paper with the charcoal. It was not quite extinguished, and the paper scorched and tore, and the goddesses would need celestial vision to make out more than her initials from so great a distance, but the effect was gratifying. She handed the stick to Naomi, who scored her paper with a capital N, and helped James make his mark. The boy was proud of his handwriting, and scuffled and elbowed at the girl, determined to manage on his own.
‘Now,’ said Joanna, collecting up the pieces of paper and tearing them into fragments: ‘Come to the fire with me. Are your hands cold? Are they full of winter?’ Full of winter, she thought: what a line! Perhaps she’d be a vicar like her father when she grew up. John looked at the tips of his fingers and wondered whether he might soon see the first black flecks of frostbite. ‘I can’t feel anything.’
‘Oh, you will,’ said Naomi, grinning. Her hair was red and so was her coat, and John had never liked her. ‘You’ll feel something all right.’ She tugged him to his feet, and they joined Joanna by the flames. Someone stood on a string of bladderwrack and made it pop, and some distance away the tide was turning.
‘Now,’ said Joanna. ‘You’re going to have to be brave, John, because this is going to hurt.’ She tossed the scraps of paper into the fire, and followed them with a scattering of salt from her mother’s silver shaker. The flames burned briefly blue. Then holding out her hands to the fire, with an imperious nod that her companions should do the same, she closed her eyes and held them, palm down, above the fire. A damp log spat sparks and scorched her father’s sleeve; she flinched, and fretting for the white skin on her brother’s wrist tugged his hands upward an inch or more. ‘We don’t need to hurt ourselves badly,’ she said hastily, ‘we just have to let our hands warm up quickly and it’ll burn like it does when you come in from the snow.’
Naomi, chewing a coil of hair, said, ‘Look: you can see my veins.’ And it was true: she had a little webbing of flesh set deep between each of her fingers, and was proud of her defect, having once heard that Anne Boleyn had had something similar and caught herself a king, nonetheless. In the firelight a ruddy glow passed through the thin flesh and threw into blue relief a vein or two. Joanna – impressed, but conscious of the need to maintain the upper hand – said: ‘We have come here to mortify our flesh, Nomi, not take pride in it.’ She used the nickname of their babyhood to show that the girl was not in disgrace, and in response Naomi flexed her fingers and said, very seriously, ‘Oh, it really hurts, I can tell you that. It’s prickling like nettles.’
The girls looked at John, whose hands wavered with his courage. Something was evidently going on, since his fingers were a vivid red and even, Joanna thought, swollen at the tips. Either the low-hanging smoke the fire gave out had stung his eyes, or he was trying not to cry. Torn between her certainty that the gods would look kindly on a sacrifice from so small a celebrant, and equal certainty that her mother would be justifiably outraged, she nudged the boy and said, ‘Higher, silly boy, higher: d’you want to burn yourself to stumps?’ At this, his held-back tears overspilled, and just at that moment (or so Joanna later told it, huddled under a school table with Naomi nodding at her side and an audience awestruck at her feet), the full moon passed out of a low blue cloud. All around them the pebble-specked sand took on a sickly cast, and the sea – creeping at them over the salt-marsh as their backs were turned – glistened.
‘A sign, you see!’ said Joanna, removing her hands from above the fire then hastily replacing them at Naomi’s raised eyebrow: ‘A portent! It is the goddess’ – she cast about for the name – ‘The goddess Phoebe, come to acknowledge our petition!’
John and Naomi turned towards the moon, and looked a long while on its downcast face. Each of them saw, in the high mottled disc, the melancholy eyes and curved mouth of a woman sunk in sadness.
‘D’you think it worked?’ Naomi could not believe that her friend might have been mistaken in so serious a matter as the summoning of spring, and besides: she’d felt the pain in her hands and she had not eaten since bread-and-cheese the night before; and had she not also seen her own name on its christened piece of paper go up in a shower of sparks? She buttoned her coat a little higher, and looked out over the salt-marsh and the sea, half-expecting to see an early sunrise, and with it a flock of swifts.