Earth and Air (12 page)

“Yes.”

“Well, there aren't any. Not anymore. You'd feel them, wouldn't you? Anyway, I would. I don't know how I would, but I would.”

“Yes.”

What the wizand in fact sensed was a change far more profound than the mere absence of active symbiotes, and more profound too than the obvious physical changes—the chain saw that had felled the ash tree, the huge contraptions that could fly far higher and faster than any broomstick, the flameless warmth in the houses, the night-time glow over the cities—those were superficial. The major change was in people's minds, their hopes, fears, understandings, beliefs, disbeliefs. The people who had burnt Phyllida Blackett hadn't known about wizands, but if they had found out they would not have been astonished. To them a wizand would have been something classifiable, a species of wood-demon, to be feared, perhaps, and if possible destroyed, but not incredible. To the people of Sophie's time a wizand was literally that—incredible. There was no place in their minds for such a concept.

So the wizand's first task in this new cycle was to discover as much as it could about those minds, and the only channel through which it could do this was Sophie. Hence her hunger to read. The wizand was not in fact troubled about her education as a witch. Her powers would come.


Time passed. The family moved south. When Sophie was thirteen her mother came into her room one evening and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes shut and her old broomstick—the one Simon had made for her for that Halloween party at the Cotlands'—across her thighs, and her hands grasping either end. The pose looked otherworldly, hieratic, and in a curious way adult, or possibly ageless.

Sophie opened her eyes and smiled, perfectly friendly, but made a silent “Shh” with her lips. Her mother returned the smile and backed out.

“Sorry to shoo you out like that, Ma,” Sophie said when she came downstairs. “I was just meditating. Belinda does it, and I thought I'd give it a go.”

“With your old witch's broom?”

“The woman who explained it to Belinda says it's sometimes useful to hold onto something—something natural's best—Belinda uses a rock from the beach—and you sort of put your everyday stuff into that and tell it to stay there while the rest of you gets on with meditating. Anyway, my broomstick feels right. I knew it when it was a tree, remember.”

“Maybe I should try it.”

“If you can sit still for long enough. It's supposed to calm you down.”

“You don't need it then. You're the calmest person I've ever met. I don't know where you get it from.”

“I have to make up for you and Dad. Shall I lay the table?”

The bit about Belinda was true, except that Belinda had given up the experiment several months ago. Sophie had kept it in reserve as an explanation, if ever she needed it. And she wasn't surprised by what her mother had said about her calmness. Her friends had commented on it, and she was aware of it in herself. Nothing that happened to her, or might happen, moment by moment, was of any weight compared to her knowledge of what she was, or rather would be. She was like a seed, waiting to become a tree.

So, apart from giving in around the end of each October to what seemed to be a seasonal itch to fly, she made no practical use of the broomstick. Instead, every evening, she “meditated” with it across her lap. At first she merely passed on to the wizand all she had learnt during the day, not merely schoolwork and reading, but her interchanges with people, their sayings and doings. Later, when she had had her first period, she began to acquire her powers.

The wizand didn't exactly give them to her. They were there, and it showed them to her. It was as if it had shown her how to open a box of specialised instruments. They were, in fact, more like that than anything else she could think of. Though incorporeal, they seemed to her to have the shape and feel of old tools, used and reused by long-dead craftsmen, blades honed and rehoned, handles smoothed and made comfortable to grasp by the endless touch of confident, work-hardened fingers. They were also a kind of knowledge, like mathematical formulae such as builders have used since before the pyramids, but those are things that anyone can acquire. These were Sophie's, and Sophie's alone, just as they had belonged exclusively to each of the long line of the wizand's earlier symbiotes. That was why they were more like tools than formulae. Some of their shapes were very strange. It might be years before Sophie discovered what they were all for.


More time passed. When Sophie was fifteen she surprised her parents by telling them that she wanted to be a doctor. Simon was a designer, Joanne a history teacher, and they had assumed that when she went to University she would read English, or something like that. But she seemed both assured and determined, as she did about most things, in her quiet way, so they agreed to her taking the necessary A-levels. The wizand, of course, approved. Medical knowledge, though the knowledge itself had changed, was something within its experience. Sophie's reasons were similar. Healing was one of the things witches did. Medicine would provide a front. Witchcraft might help the healing process. So she worked hard, and got the results she needed in order to have some choice in the university she would go to, back in the north, where both she and the wizand belonged.

She took the broomstick with her and hung it on the wall of her room. Nobody thought this strange. Students keep all sorts of junk as totemic objects. Most days she meditated. This was equally normal. She made friends, easily, with anyone she liked the look of. It just happened, with no special effort on her part. More unnervingly—though it took a lot to unnerve her, these days—she found that she had only to look at some man with a feeling of mild physical interest on her part, and within a week or two he would have taken steps to get to know her, and be giving clear signals of wishing for something more, though she herself was merely borderline pretty, and that on her best days. She needed the presence of the man himself for this to work. It was no use going to a film and fantasising about Tom Cruise, but if he had happened to be visiting Leeds . . . No, once she'd discovered the effect, she'd have stayed clear. It wouldn't have been worth the risk.

After a while, very much in a spirit of sober experiment, she allowed some of these encounters to go further. The results could be physically satisfying, but not emotionally, because the men seemed unable to remain at her superficial level of involvement. Instead, whether she went to bed with them or not, they seemed to become not merely passionate but obsessed. She tried the obvious step of initiating the relationship via a carefully controlled fantasy, with definite rules of engagement, but it made no difference.

“Yes,” said the wizand, when she told it.

“You mean that's just how it goes? It's no use trying to get them to understand I don't want them to feel like that about me.”

“Say they don't,” suggested the wizand.

“All right,” said Sophie. “I'll give it a go.”

She chose an archaeology student called Josh, already on the fringe of her circle, a healthy outdoor type with an affable personality. He had the advantage of being emotionally at a loose end, because his long-time girlfriend had decided to go and be a vet in New Zealand. He was standing at the bar in a pub talking rugby with his mates, with his back to Sophie, when she fantasised about spending a night with him in a tent in an owl-infested wood. Ten minutes later he was sitting at her table. Within a week they were lovers.

She let his passion run for another ten days and then, one morning while they were dressing for his ritual run (she bicycled beside him for company), she took him by the hands and said, “Look me in the eyes, Josh.”

He did so, frowning.

“Josh,” she said slowly and quietly, “you don't love me anymore.”

His frown deepened. He shook his head, naively bewildered.

“No,” he said. “I suppose I don't. I'm sorry, Sophie.”

“Don't worry,” she said. “That's fine by me. We can go on as we are, if you want to. Just taking it easy on the emotional bit, if you see what I mean.”

“All right,” he said. “I suppose it was getting a bit unhealthy.”


Sophie found the change a considerable improvement on her previous relationships, but it was still not fully satisfying. Josh made the point one evening, speaking thoughtfully out of a long silence.

“You've never been in love, have you, Sophie?”

“No, I suppose not. Not yet.”

“I don't think you know how. You're just too cool. Not quite human.”

She'd laughed, but inwardly accepted the point. Not quite human. Something else.

Despite that, the relationship worked for both of them, a steady companionship without emotional commitment. (Josh was planning to go out to New Zealand when his course ended, if his girlfriend didn't return before that.) So they were still together at the end of the academic year, and settled in as before at the start of the next term. Towards the end of October they took advantage of a late fine spell to go camping for a long weekend. Sophie chose the location, a valley merely glimpsed on a summer jaunt into the western hills, though the memory of that glimpse had kept sidling into her mind at irrelevant moments since. As she meditated the evening before they left the wizand said “Take me.” It didn't occur to her not to do so.

They left the motorway and climbed a side road to a col, then began to descend a boulder-strewn hillside, bare apart from a large patch of old woodland a couple of hundred yards away on the left. Seen from this angle, Sophie recognised the place, recognised it from a single visit thirteen years before, a sulky child, slumped in the back of the car, barely glancing out of the window.

“Try along there?” she said.

“It doesn't look . . .”

He had already passed the turning. She was forced to use a little of her power, something she had avoided doing to him so far. She laid her fingers on his bare forearm.

“Please, Josh,” she said.

He braked, reversed, and turned along the track. It was evidently not much used. The weeds along the centre rasped against the underside of the car. In places, anthills had encroached. Apart from the crawling car the hillside seemed entirely empty. Two sagging strands of rusty barbed wire blocked the entrance to the wood. Josh stopped and craned round to check for a turning place, but Sophie was already out of the car.

“For heaven's sake . . .” he called as she disentangled the loose post at one side of the entrance and dragged the wire clear, as she'd seen her father do thirteen years ago. She heard his call as if from much further away, but ignored it and walked on into the wood.

Fifty yards in, the track crossed a clearing, floored with the sort of fine, pale grass that grows in places mainly shadowed from the sun. To the right of it, at the edge of the trees, rose a low mound with a dip in the centre. There was a pile of cordwood stacked beside the track, ready for carting away.

Sophie stopped and looked around. Now there were two layers of recognition, both from thirteen years before, two visits, once by daylight with her father, once at midnight with the wizand. She hadn't connected them at the time, but now the memory of the second visit was far the stronger. She could hear, though far more faintly this time, the same high humming inside her head, and feel that nameless pressure all around her.

Josh came up behind her.

“What's up?” he said

He was so good natured that crossness didn't sound right in his voice—more as if he were putting it on because she was treating him badly and it was his duty to be cross about it.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I've just remembered. I came here once with my father. I went into a sort of daze, remembering. I suppose that's some sort of burial mound over there.”

“Don't get them round here. It's probably a collapsed building. The high bit outside was the walls, and the dip's where the roof fell in. There's a deserted village down by the stream, if I'm thinking of the right place. Doctor Wedlow was going to lead a dig there, but something stopped it.”

“Can we camp here?”

He sighed. It wasn't his idea of a camping place. He liked open, windy uplands.

“If you want to be eaten to death by mosquitoes,” he said.

“There won't be any. I bet you.”

“How much?”

“Dinner at Shastri's?”

“So I've got to be eaten before I can eat? Oh, all right. I'll get the car.”

“Don't bring it all the way. Leave it on the track.”

She didn't move. Dimly she heard the engine start, and stop. Josh's voice spoke behind her.

“What on earth did you put this in for?”

She didn't trouble to turn and look.

“It's due some fresh birch twigs. I'll use the old ones to light the fire.”

Sophie pulled herself out of her half trance and helped set up the tent, and then to gather firewood. Josh liked to cook on these occasions, so she left him to fry sausages and chips and construct one of his pungent sauces while she cut twigs from a fallen birch beside the track. As she sat cross legged with the broomstick across her lap and shaped and bound the bundle into place, the yellow circular leaves fell from the twigs and scattered in a pattern around her, like iron filings round a magnet.