Black Feathers (30 page)

Megan’s hearing reaches out for clues. The sounds of shouting and bustle from the market have diminished almost to nothing. By now the stallholders and hawkers and all their customers will have gone home or back to their camps. The clunk and splash of waterwheels seems louder now and comes from all around her.

She feels the sandy bank soften beneath her feet. They are at the water’s edge. From all sides, hands lift her and for a moment her feet touch something that feels like a solid wooden floor. Then she is forced to her knees and from there onto her belly. The knife remains pressed against her neck. She hears the sound of oars gently cutting water and feels the rocking of the river beneath her.

Only a few moments later she feels the bottom of the boat hiss to a stop on the sand. This bank of the river is very different. It’s quieter than the market side and smells of sewage and rot. The air is cold and still, somehow stagnant. It feels like a different world.

She is lifted from the boat and marched up the bank. Near the top she is manhandled from the sand onto an outcropping of grass. She is propelled by hands from all sides. Megan considers screaming now that the blade has been withdrawn, but what good will it do? Even if Mr Keeper hears her, they could slit her throat long before he can cross the river and intervene.

They come to a halt. Megan hears the sound of a canvas flap being pulled open. Hands force her to bend and she is pushed through a low opening. Close, dirty heat replaces the cool air of nightfall. Her captors withdraw and the flap falls shut behind her. She tries to stand upright and her head comes into contact with a low roof made of what feels and sounds like woven reed or rush. Unsure what to do, she stays bent at the waist and half crouched, waiting.

Although the others have certainly gone, Megan senses she’s not alone. The air in the space around her is too charged. Somebody observes her in silence, of that she is certain.

“I’d like to sit down, please,” she says, her words weak and unconvincing.

Silence swallows them. Perhaps she is alone, after all. Alone but for her imagination, which has always been a little too active to be useful. And if she is alone, then there’s no reason why she can’t–

“Now that you’re here, you can be at your ease. Remove the covering from your head.”

It’s a female voice. A commanding tone with an edge of impatience and weariness. That it is a woman she shares this new space with brings Megan a wash of relief. She removes her hood to find herself in the warm glow of tallow candles, the greasy scent taking her all the way to Amu’s kitchen in an instant. As she lowers herself to the filthy reed matting, she sees whose dwelling it is.

The woman sits cross-legged, everything below her waist wrapped in torn, grimy blankets. Above her waist, she is naked. The folds of her belly suggest she has born many children, and her breasts, hanging drained and limp, are testament to this. Now, though, her nipples have been pierced and short wooden dowels the colour of peat poke horizontally from each teat. They look to Megan like dams, either symbolic or actual, to prevent any more of the woman’s milk from flowing.

Her skin is the kind of brown that only comes from spending every day outside for the whole arc of the sun to touch. It has the look of hide about it, and the wrinkles and cracks it bears are deep. Dirt fills each fold of skin, especially at her armpits, where dense hair bushes. Her neck is a mess of fold and wattles, each crease gritty with filth. When she speaks these loose rolls of skin shake and wobble, making Megan think of turkeys. Her face, too, is a sagging succession of dewlaps, the weight of her skin pulling her lower lids away from her eyes, exposing jaundiced sclera and capillaries that look like rusty fractures in polished ivory. Her septum is pierced with the same dark dowelling as her nipples, and her ears, twice the length they ought to be, hold polished wooden discs the size of Megan’s palm. Much of her torso is tattooed with curling symbols and ancient glyphs, now faded to a filthy blue. Like Mr Keeper, her hair is long and matted.

What has she done, Megan wonders, to put her on this side of the river?

“It’s some lofty company you keep, girlie.” The voice is wheezy and laboured. Somewhere deep in the woman’s chest, something vibrates. “Not that most hereabouts would notice. What brings you to Shep Afon?”

Megan’s jaw clenches.

Girlie
?

“My name is Megan Maurice. I walk the Black Feathered Path and that is our business here.”

The woman makes a long reedy noise, catching something thick and wet in her lungs and bringing it north. She grumbles a gobbet of phlegm into her mouth, reaches for a wooden bowl and spits a deep green lump into it as if that’s what she thinks of Megan’s introduction.

“So you say. So you say.”

The woman reaches around beside the blankets that cover her legs until she retrieves a baccy pouch and some papers. She rolls a fat, loose cone, crumbling dark aromatic herbs into it as she works. When she lights up from a nearby tallow candle the smell is unfamiliar to Megan.

“It’s my medicine, Megan. Keeps me right.”

She inhales deeply from the cone, holding the smoke inside. When she finally lets the breath go, she appears to relax and shrink. The wheeze sounds just as bad.

“When Mr Keeper wakes up, he’s going to come looking for me.”

The woman regards her through baggy-skinned eyes.

“Perhaps he will. But not on this side of the river. He has no business here. Neither of them does, and well they know it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You will when they don’t turn up, Megan. Believe me, they’re not coming for you. Not here.”

Is she telling the truth, wonders Megan, or just trying to frighten me?

The fear she has held down, ever since the hand slid over her mouth and the knife dug into her neck, now surfaces out of control. She begins to back towards the door flap.

“Don’t bother. They’re waiting for you right outside. All they’re going to do is bring you back – tied up. Is that what you want?”

Megan shakes her head.

“Sit back down and be still, then.”

Megan returns to her place on the reed matting. So that the woman won’t see her crying, she bows her head and lets her hair fall in front of her face. Smoke fills the small space entirely and she feels light-headed.

After a few moments she peeks out between locks of hair but nothing much has changed; the woman still sits there smoking her cone down to a nub, holding each breath before letting the smoke go. Megan relaxes a little. The lightness in her head is quite pleasant and some of the knots of tension go from her shoulders.

“Who are you?” she asks after a while.

“My name is Bodbran. Folk call me Bran.”

Bran places the last piece of her smoking cone, too short to suck on without burning her lips, into the bowl where she spits her phlegm. It sizzles out. For the first time she smiles, and Megan sees a deep kindness written in all the winkles and bags of her face, as though it is smiling and laughter that has put them there.

“Has the moon touched you yet, Megan?”

At first Megan doesn’t understand. A moment later her face flares and reddens. As though in response to the old woman’s question, she senses a familiar dragging deep in her belly. She will bleed soon.

Bodbran nods and says:

“Time is short.”

“I don’t understand,” says Megan.

“There’s something you must do, Megan. Something very important. I can’t let you return to the other side of the river until it is done.”

“Heard of the Crowman?” Cooky said with a guarded look. “Oh, I’ve heard of him all right. Most people have, though you don’t hear many admit to it. Why do you want to know?”

For once Gordon managed to deflect a question with a lie.

“I’m just curious,” he said. “I keep hearing about him. My family used to talk about him before they…”

“Before they what?”

Gordon looked down at his feet, hiding his lying face from Cooky and knowing that the gesture would be interpreted as shame and reluctance to speak. He left long spaces between his words, hoping this would draw Cooky further into his untruths.

“Things weren’t… good… at home. I had to leave. When they weren’t… hurting me… Mum and Dad were always talking about this Crowman. It seemed like he was something to do with why everything’s changing now. It was like he made everything worse. I keep thinking if I could find out the truth about him I might be able to understand why they changed so much. I might be able to…” Gordon put his face in his hands and sobbed, “… go home.”

Cooky patted Gordon’s back without confidence. He didn’t let his hand linger. Gordon knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want to be anything like Gordon’s “parents”. He didn’t want to be dyed their same sick colour. He wanted to make things right somehow, and so his words spilled out. Like he was answering the boy’s need with a story, as though his words were soothing medicine.

“I’ll tell you as much as I can,” he said. “As much as I know. The trouble is…”

Gordon looked up, knowing his eyes were red and wet, allowing himself to look as lost and frightened as he really was.

“The trouble is what?” he said with a broken croak.

“The trouble is no one really knows the truth about him. No one knows if he’s real or just an urban myth.”

“What’s an urban myth?”

“It’s like a folk tale but for modern people. People who live in cities.”

“My parents believed in him but they didn’t live in a city.”

“Fair enough, Louis. But cities are the place where these stories usually start. They’re like rumours that might be true. Do you see what I’m saying? Telling you everything I know may not help you at all if none of it is true.”

“It will help me. It’ll help me understand my mum and dad better. That’s all I want.”

Cooky went to the fire where the tea stayed warm at its edge in a white enamel pot with blue edging. He poured them both a cup and added a little whisky to one of them. The one he handed to Gordon was just tea.

“You’ve had enough drink for one day,” said Cooky, winking. Then he sat down beside Gordon and took a drink from his mug. The fire, down to a pile of nicely glowing coals, exhaled a muted, continuous hiss. Gordon listened in the pause before Cooky began to speak, and there was nothing but the long dying breath of the fire. No birds singing. No branches snapping in the distance. No rustling of small animals in the undergrowth. The forest seemed expectant.

“The first I ever heard of the Crowman was in my local on a Friday night lock-in. There were about ten of us in the Half Moon that evening, mostly farmers and one or two younger lads with nothing better to do of a weekend than drink until they couldn’t stand up straight.

“Conversation was lively and raucous, as you’d expect for that time of night with that amount of beer swilling in every gut. But the atmosphere in any pub can change in a flicker of a moment and one by one everyone gets drawn into the new mood. Could be laughter. Could be sadness. Could be grief. Could be triumph.”

Cooky clicked his fingers.

“It can happen like that.”

He took a thoughtful sip of whisky-laced tea, his eyes focussing into memory as he relived the lock-in.

“But it wasn’t like that this particular night. The ambience in the place changed gradually. I can’t remember what started it – maybe I didn’t even hear what it was – but soon we were discussing what we’d do if it was our last day on Earth, how we’d want to spend it. That got a few laughs going for a while, but in general the mood of the place went downhill.

“Now I’d had a lot to drink that night. You don’t stay for a lock-in and sip tonic water, after all. Nights like that are always a blur the next morning – especially the conversations. All I tend to remember is the feelings of a night out; it’s like someone mutes the soundtrack and I can only remember how it looked and felt. But the next morning I woke up and I remembered just one thing: the words Bill Tatchforth spoke.

“‘The end times are coming,’ he said.

“He had hands like shovels, Bill Tatchforth, so callused and hardened from working outdoors the skin was more like horn, tougher even than leather. When he picked up his pint it would disappear behind his fingers like a child’s cup. Everyone shut up when Bill spoke, because apart from ‘how do’ or ‘pint of the usual’ or ‘nice again today’ – which he’d say in even the foulest weather – Bill never said a word to anyone. He would just sit and drink quietly and steadily from the moment he arrived to the moment he left. Fifteen pints. No more or less every Friday night. In that time he’d get up for a piss only two or three times and he’d walk out of there steady as a rock and walk home to Manor Farm through rain or hail or snow or fog. It was like nothing touched him.

“But
something
touched him all right, and that was the night he talked about it while everyone else in the pub, even Jim Chivers the landlord, listened in utter silence, not daring to laugh or interrupt in case it shut Bill up for another twenty years.

“‘The Black Dawn,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s coming. No one alive will ever have seen a time like it and most of us won’t live to tell about it.’ He took a long, deep pull of his beer and nodded to Jim Chivers for another. ‘I’ve seen it in my dreams almost every night for the last ten years or so. And when I’m out attending to things come the morning, I can feel it in the land all around me. Something’s coming. Something bad.’

“Jim Chivers put Bill’s next pint on the counter top. I remember watching the foam overflowing and sliding down the sides of that pint glass like something dying. There wasn’t a sound in the Half Moon. Everyone was listening for what might come out of Bill’s mouth next. I think most of us were hoping it would be some kind of a joke. Except Bill Tatchforth had never told a joke in all the years I’d known him. Everyone approached the bar, where we were standing like believers at the feet of a prophet.

“‘There’s a dark man coming. I’ve seen him in my dreams too. Fingers like black straw poking out of torn sleeves. Sometimes I see him standing at the crest of some bald hill, those arms and fingers stretching up and out like he’s reaching for the edges of the world and crying out to heaven. His coat blows out behind him like dark wings. Like a scarecrow, he is. A ragged, walking scarecrow. But he’s a message for us. He’s the one bringing the Black Dawn, the end times. Where he walks there’s death. Sickness, starvation, war, the land broken and changed forever. I’ve seen it all.’

“Bill Tatchforth drained his next pint in one and then he pointed one of his huge fingers at us. I’d never seen him do that before either.

“‘You’ll mark my words if you’ve any sense between the lot of you. The Crowman’s coming. And you’d better be ready.’

“And then he stood up, like he was coming out of a trance or something, and the old shy half smile he usually wore returned to his face. He said goodnight with a small wave, just like he always did, and let himself out of the Half Moon’s back door. It was so quiet we could all hear his footsteps as he walked away up to Manor Farm.

“The next Friday he came in, just the same as always. Ordered his usual and stood at the bar like nothing had happened. No one asked him about it and nothing was ever said. I never heard it mentioned again.”

Through all of this Gordon sat unmoving, his second mug of tea untouched. It had cooled between his cupped hands, and now he drained the mug and set it down beside him on the ground.

“Do you think Bill Tatchforth was… mad or something?”

Cooky’s sips of tea were more leisurely, more savoured.

“No. I don’t. We – the regulars in the Half Moon, that is – didn’t see quite as much of him over the coming months. Sometimes he’d miss his Friday-night drink and that would mean a fortnight could pass without him tipping his flat cap at you. But when he was in the pub he was just the same as he’d always been before that one strange night. Even I began to find excuses for his outburst – maybe he’d had no dinner that night and the beer had gone to his head for once. Maybe he was taking medication for something and it had made him a bit peculiar.

“For almost a year that’s what I let myself think. We saw Bill less and less over that time. When we did see him, though, he was the same old Bill we’d always known. Then there was a stretch of several weeks when no one saw him. Not in the Half Moon, not out on his tractor hauling hay or moving his beasts from one pasture to another. Weeks became a couple of months, then three. Jim Chivers started to mention it every Friday night.

“‘Haven’t seen Bill for a while,’ he’d say, and there would follow a silence in which some of us remembered that one odd night and all of us would wonder if any of the others had bothered to go up to the farmhouse door and knock to see if Bill was OK. None of us had. Shameful, when you think about it. Just because Bill was quiet and a little aloof, just because no one really knew anything about him, looking back that really isn’t enough of a reason not go and see if a person needs some help. I’m still ashamed of it now, Louis. If there’s one message I could pass on to a young man like you, something I knew he’d always remember, it would be ‘look after those around you, no matter who they are’. Treat them the way you’d want to be treated if you were the one in trouble. If everyone did that one simple thing, the world would be a different place. It wouldn’t have come to… this.”

“Do you mean all the rioting and stuff?”

Cooky looked angry for a moment and then his face softened. Gordon could guess what his thoughts had been: “How can he be so stupid?” followed by “Well, he’s only a boy”. Heat prickled his cheeks.

“I mean everything. The way this country’s gone. The way the world’s gone. The weather, the economy, the self-serving government, the crooked legal system, the diseases and food shortages, the rise of the Ward. All of it. It shouldn’t have come to this, Louis. If only we’d cared a little more for each other and a little less for ourselves it could have been…”

Gordon thought he saw a glistening around the corners of Cooky’s eyes and he tried to look away, not wanting to see a grown man show weakness – embarrassed by it.

“…it could have been paradise. And we fucked it all up. Bill Tatchforth wasn’t mad. He knew all this. And what he said about the Crowman, well, I can’t say I’ve seen the Crowman but I can agree with Bill about the bad times and the Black Dawn. It gets closer every day. I think what he saw wasn’t a man at all but a spirit or an energy that will stay here until we learn how to look after it and each other. Only when we get back to a state of counting the simple blessings of each day and the importance of our friends and families. Only when we give something back for every time we take something. Only then will this dark energy or spirit leave us alone. I think the Crowman is some kind of teacher or caretaker. And I think he’s going to be here for a long, long time.

“Bill was getting ready. He’d told us to get ready, but none of us did. He’d dug a shelter under his farm and lined it with concrete. I can just imagine him down there of a night time, stripped to the waist and mixing concrete in a barrow, shuttering it all up himself and getting old Margie to hand him his tools. He’d stashed enough food to last three or four years for the pair of them and Patch and Gilly his sheepdogs. He had extra shotguns and tons of cartridges and secret ways in and out of the shelter. I heard he even had ways of listening to what was going on upstairs in the farmhouse so he knew if it was safe to go out or not.”

Gordon had to interrupt:

“But what was he afraid of? What exactly?”

“No one will ever know now. Nuclear war. An invasion. Some kind of natural disaster. Maybe just lawless times. But he was ready. Just like he told us to be.”

“Why will no one ever know? What happened to him?”

“The Ward happened to him. He was collected and charged with hoarding. They took all his livestock away, all his provisions. They demolished the farm and the shelter with explosives. There’s nothing left of it now. And no one’s ever seen Bill Tatchforth since the day they took him away. They never will, either. No one comes back from collection. Ever.”

Gordon was on his feet before he knew what he was doing. On his feet and walking away from Cooky. Walking anywhere that he wouldn’t have to hear another word from the man’s mouth. Cooky came after him.

“What is it, Louis? You all right, lad?”

Gordon ran into the trees but Cooky stopped at the edge of the camp. In the old man’s silence Gordon could hear him adding it all up. Cooky would know the Ward had something to do with why Gordon was “passing through”. As soon as Cooky told the others, it would be time to move on. Weeping angry, heartbroken tears and shaking his head against what Cooky had said, Gordon stopped and rested his head against the trunk of a pine tree. Please, please, please. Make it all stop. Give me back my family and my life and I’ll–

What? What could he offer in return for the impossible?

There was nothing.

The Crowman was his only hope. Cooky had to be wrong about it being just an energy or some kind of spirit. And he had to be wrong about the Ward too. Mum and Dad had both told him the Crowman was the key. He had to believe them if no one else. Find the Crowman and they had a chance. That’s what they’d written. It was all he had now: the road to the Crowman.

And now that Cooky had guessed what put Gordon on the road in the first place, it was time to gather his gear and move on.