Black Feathers

65

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.