Black Feathers

29

Gordon feels a searing in his thigh, as though the lips of his wound are being prised open with glowing irons. Lava erupts from within and spills over his leg and groin, spreading the fire. Burning rivulets of this ichor spread radiant orange veins up over his belly and chest, finally setting his head aflame. Through all of this, he sleeps, his body too spent to respond.

The rest of Gordon’s awareness is imprisoned in dreams.

He is beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, looking back at the world in its protective bubble. All is silent and peaceful. Re-entry is pure white heat and then he is diving towards the body of the world, seeing the shapes of the continents at first and then recognising countries. Weather systems become visible and grow and he descends through layers of cloud until he can see Europe. But his destination is his own country, Britain.

From this height, the land of his birth is still tranquil but as he nears its surface, when individual fields and roads and built-up areas come into view, he begins to see signs of turmoil. In many places smoke rises, obscuring the view of the fires creating it. The cars on the roads have stopped moving. Instead he can see lines of people, miles long, snaking between the stalled vehicles. The roads themselves are cracked and, in some places, buckled and broken. In towns and cities, piles of rubble mark the places where buildings have collapsed. There are rifts in the earth where the green of fields is divided by black chasms. Some of them extend across entire counties. People, animals, cars and even entire homes have fallen into these new cracks in the world. Those who are not fleeing the cataclysms are at war. Men and women dressed in brown, green and black clash with cohorts of troops in grey. The grey troops are organised and fight in tight units. Their opponents, some kind of rebel army, are outnumbered and fight using hit-and-run tactics. Many of them fall as the grey troops advance across the country. Everywhere the bodies of the dead rot where they fell, food for the land and its creatures, carrion for the crows which populate every scene of chaos and conflict.

He sees the smoking ruins of his own home and the destruction of what was once his family smallholding. Even the garden wall and the green door with its rusty hinges have been knocked down. The trees in the orchard and the huge horse chestnut which had stood near the back terrace, even these have been cut down, and they smoulder now beside the wreckage of Hamblaen House, the house where he was born.

The wind sweeps him on a meandering course around counties and towns he has never seen before. And yet, aspects of each place strike a note of resonance in his heart. These are places where important things have happened to him, and yet he can’t remember what they are. Finally, the winds take him south. A great reluctance rises within him.

He tries to resist but the wind is too strong. He comes to a hill where there was once a small forest. Now, all that remains of the trees is ebony stumps. At the crest of the hill, one tree remains, its trunk is contorted and squat, its boughs bunched and twisted. Its outer branches, every one charred to black bone, rise in supplication towards the unanswering sky.

The wind sets Gordon down at the very front of the tree. Behind it, the sun is setting. Against its dying fire, in the highest of the blackened branches, are three watchful crows. At the bottom of the hill, a great crowd of people is gathering. The crows call out to Gordon and he knows he has been here a thousand times before.

The earth is shaking. His body is being moved. Something takes hold of him. Gordon is unable to struggle against it. The shaking gets worse.

Someone whispers:

“Can you hear me? Tell me your name.”

He tries to answer but his mouth won’t work. He is being pulled now and he tries to resist, but his body won’t respond. He tries to reach for the knife in his pocket but his body is as good as dead. He feels himself hoisted up and over a large shoulder. The movement reawakens the pain in his cut and he cries out, hearing the weakness of his own shout as it echoes in darkness. Somewhere there is light. Long before he reaches it, he loses consciousness again.

Recalling his story is not difficult, it lives in Megan like verse learned by heart, and when she comes to sit and write, it waits, as though the words are queuing up in her wrist. What takes the time, and what is more troublesome than she expected, is the physical act of writing with a raven feather quill.

With the responsibility of marking the story onto paper, she is nervous of making mistakes and so she writes very slowly. She can’t help but think of the ink as the Crowman’s blood, something he has given so that his story may be told. The ink takes a long time to dry, so she has taken to using one of her moon cloths to absorb the excess before it can smudge the pristine pages.

Mr Keeper has told her very little about the history of their world and almost nothing about the Crowman.

“You must see it for yourself,” he always says.

She knows a little from school, though. Perhaps eight or ten generations past, no one knows exactly when, dark times befell the land. There was sickness and war, and the Earth Amu withheld her bounties. Floods, earthquakes and diseases wiped out most of the people from that time. They called it the Black Dawn. It was in those days of scarcity and death that the Crowman returned to the land – as he had whenever the balance between folk and the Earth was lost. He walked the woodlands and fields, the hills and valleys, and no one knew if he was for the good or if he was the devil himself. That’s why they gave him other names like Scarecrow and Black Jack. Even now, no one is quite sure whether to love or fear the Crowman, but one thing is certain: everyone respects him. This, says Mr Keeper quite often, is exactly as it should be.

The feather the dark boy gave her is with her whenever she writes. Sometimes when she remembers a part of the story in which the images or events are impossible to describe, she takes the feather and lays it across her forehead for a few moments. After that, words always come. She doesn’t know the new words but she knows that they are right. Her language grows.

The writing causes her pain – in her hand predominantly, which cramps and stiffens after being held for so long in the same position. But after she has sat for some hours, the pain extends up her arm and into her shoulders and down her back. Each time this happens she knows it is time to rest. Her mother brings her glasses of cool water from the stone ewer and sometimes warm milk if it’s late in the evening, but Megan won’t touch the drinks while she is writing. She is terrified she may spill them on the book and spoil it. She always finds the cool water warm or the hot milk cold by the time she is ready to take a break.

After nightfall, she continues by candlelight, the small flames casting flickering shadows of her hand onto the wall, transforming it into a monstrous, deformed claw. She notices little of what goes on around her each time the flow of the story has resumed. Nothing stops the story except her decision to finish writing, and nothing begins it other than her sitting at her table once the ink is ground, mixed and blessed.

While she writes the first part of the story her sleep is black and dreamless and restful. She wakes early each day and begins again feeling solid and happy in her purpose. Before seeing the Crowman in Covey Wood she had begun to wonder what her life was to be about. She had begun to wonder what meaning it could possibly have, things she sometimes talked about with Sally Balston, though not always with Tom Frewin. She no longer has such questions or concerns. This lends her mind a calmness she had not known before and she senses this as another sign of childhood passing away. She does not miss it but she knows Apa and Amu do. She sees them looking at her sometimes, just a glance usually, and they always turn away when they know she has noticed the observation. The glances are sad and sometimes a little puzzled, as though her parents are wondering where their daughter has gone. If she had the time or the energy to spare, she would sit and tell them that here is Megan, the same Megan they’ve always known, only a little older inside and a little harder on the outside. She would tell them that there is more Megan now than there has ever been before, not less. And she would tell them to rejoice in that knowledge because it is a sign of things being right in the world.

But Megan has never talked to Apa and Amu in quite that way and she’s not sure she ever will.

Sometimes she thinks of her friends and her days at school. Tom and Sally have been at her side like a brother and sister for as long as she can remember. All of that seems so far away now as to have been a part of someone else’s life. The time she spends walking to Mr Keeper’s roundhouse begins long before school begins and she always returns long after school has finished. It is as though Megan’s world now and the world of Megan just a few weeks before have separated and drifted away from each other like continents separating, an ocean widening between them.

It takes three days for her to write the first part of the Crowman’s story, and as she does so she is able to distance herself from the boy at the centre of the tale. But when she is not writing, in those moments before she falls to sleep and those moments before she rises, sometimes when she takes a break to eat or drink, she feels the boy’s presence intimately, like the soul of a recently departed sibling. His story has started in troubled times and with no small amount of secret drama. Already she is terrified for the innocent child with black satin hair and polished grey eyes, the boy with the pale skin and destiny written in his very blood.

On the morning of the fourth day, it is with no small weight of fear in her guts that she walks back to Mr Keeper’s roundhouse. Soon there will be more to write in the Book of the Crowman.

It is to be a book of pain with sorrow in every chapter.