Pandaemonium (24 page)

For the first time, I wasn’t entirely sure that was actually true, I thought even my Aspect might have a limit to its stamina, but I told it to myself anyway. And tried not to listen to the rustling, surging sounds behind me as a swarm of eels glided over a bed of crushed barley-stalks. Grinning, most likely, as they came, if you wanted to call that ready gape a grin.

I didn’t look back. Head down, pick your knees up, run.

Hang on to the whisky.

U
P AND UP
, and further up. It’s that kind of country, where what goes up must become a down. One last hedgerow, and no more crops to kick through: now there was just coarse, tough, sheep-cropped turf beneath my feet in long rolling ridges, and I could run and run.

So I did that, I ran and ran, with
slither, slither
always at my back.

Ancient trackways ran along the ridgetops, mattering more than mortal people knew. I ignored them, if high-hurdling from one side to the other counts as ignoring. Really it’s the opposite, taking very careful account of them and doing my utmost not to get entangled, not tonight, not now. Similarly, I ignored – in the sense of utmostly avoiding – the occasional striding figure glimpsed on one path or another. They might be able to help me, there was a decent chance of that. The chance that they might choose to do so? Vanishingly small. Better, always, not to get involved. Just leave them be and hurry by.

As to what I did instead...

Well. At least I had the whisky. That was something.

Might be something.

Might even be enough.

I
RAN, AS
we know. They followed, as we know. I didn’t get away; they didn’t catch me up.

I might as well not have bothered with all that running, really, except.

Except that it brought me at last to the rising slope of one more hill, where something other than a Bronze Age footpath had cut through the sward.

Been cut, that is, and more purposefully. With tools and effort, not just the passage of time and feet across geography.

Show the English a chalky hill, and they’ll cut a figure into it. Then or now, no different. White giants stalk the landscape. Some of them are prehistoric, some are modern, most are Victorian. They’re all sentimental to some degree.

They’re not all horses, not quite. Most of them, though, yes. There’s even a word for it.

Leucippotomy, since you ask.

This one? Is certainly a horse. Why else would I have run so far?

The clue’s in the name. It’s famous. Even the inn down the valley is named after it, and has been for centuries.

I stood there at its head – for no good reason, really, any part of it would do, if this did any good at all – and twisted the cap off the whisky bottle.

Behind me, below, came
slither, slither.
I tried to ignore it. No good reason. Concentration wasn’t going to make a difference here. I suppose it maybe felt respectful, though. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think how close those eels were coming, while I stood there sloshing spirits onto bone-bare chalk.

“Hey,” I said. “Want to wake up? I brought you a drink...”

It’s not
magic
, okay? There isn’t a
spell
. You don’t have to chant archaic nonsense and march around three times widdershins and sacrifice a virgin at the full of the moon.

Just as well, really. I didn’t have time, the moon wasn’t up and I hadn’t brought a virgin. There was that boy back at the inn, and I might have felt tempted, but.

No need. He’s a horse; just talk to him.

H
E LIFTS HIS
head and all the world is breathless still. Even the
slither, slither
has to pause, not to break the moment. Like a bubble out of time, that moment: infinitely fragile, infinitely strong.

He lifts his skull head from the earth, the dead white of bone: bone-white and dead and hollow.

He lifts his eyeless skull of a head, and looks at me.

He doesn’t talk back. He’s a horse. But he rises, and only his head is bone; the rest of him is art. Art made actual. A pure impression of horse, a sketch cut out of light. In the dark, he shines; in daylight, just the same. It’s a different manner of light, or your eyes find him differently, or there simply aren’t the words in English. Or the ideas, in any language, in anybody’s head. The reality of him is... elsewhere.

He stands, and he’s the size he ought to be, for me: still entirely astonishing, but astonishing in scale. On the ground he’s enormous, unreachable. And then he stands up, and he’s a horse. He’s there. Big as a stallion should be, and he is very much a stallion: say seventeen hands or a fraction less, manageable for a tall girl. I’m tall enough.

G
IRLS AND PONIES.
What can I say? I’m not immune. Fay loved to ride, and Desi didn’t grow out of that, she only put it aside for a while.

Slither, slither.

Time to pick it back up, then.

If I dared, if I was allowed.

If it was even possible. He was made of light and line, and I am... solid flesh. Very solid, with my Aspect on me. Would he,
could
he carry me?

It was his call, of course, either way, but my first move.

Right, then.

It felt suddenly worse than impertinent: lèse-majesté or something like it, an absolute trespass, doing something sacrilegious on what should be holy ground. Even so, I laid a hand on his shoulder. Just to see, really. Just to touch, to learn how he felt, to learn if he would let me.

He stood still beneath my hand, and felt just as solid as I was. Well, good.

Even so. Touching him was one thing. Mounting him? Apparently something else altogether, and something in me didn’t want to do it.

I
DELAYED TOO
long.
Slither, slither
and here they were, relentless and appalling, surging up the slope with those dreadful mouths agape already.

I needed more time, and didn’t have it.

What I did have, though, I had a bottle of whisky in my other hand. Half sloshed out in a libation, which meant half full still; and the proof of spirit used to be whether gunpowder would still ignite after it was soaked in the stuff. You can’t think about spirits without flame spluttering into mind.

Flame, bottle...

Horses traditionally don’t like fire, but I doubted this one would spook.

I ripped the sleeve off my shirt and stuffed it into the neck of the bottle, then tipped that upside down to soak the wick with whisky while I fished in my pocket for the kid’s lighter. Okay, maybe he didn’t deserve sacrificing after all. So long as the damn thing would light.

I hadn’t looked, but of course it was a Zippo; Zippos are cool, now and always. I flipped back the lid, flicked the wheel for a spark, felt a touch of relief as the flame caught.

Touched flame to wick, whirled the bottle around my head to get a proper blaze going, and hurled it dramatically towards the encroaching eels.

Ah, well.

I’d have done better to drink the stuff. Turns out that regular blended whisky – yes, of course it was White Horse brand, what else? – doesn’t explode like a proper Molotov cocktail at all. It barely wants to burn. I guess my mother worked harder than I knew to light the brandy on the family Christmas pud.

Improvisation is always good, in principle; you do the best you can with what’s to hand. Sometimes, though? Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. You can’t always beat a sword with a ploughshare. In my head there was a great eruption, vivid flame and vicious glass shrapnel driving back this swarm of anxious fire-phobic eels. In reality there was a sort of splutter, a flicker, a thud. The bottle didn’t even break, until one of the eels oozed right over it in its eagerness to get at me.

Okay, then. I had no time, no weapons, no choices left.

No hesitation left in me, either. Apparently.

Actually, the way it felt, my Aspect got tired of waiting for me to wise up, and did the necessary all by itself. Picked me up and flung me onto the horse’s back.

That, or I vaulted there neatly and all by myself. You decide.

CHAPTER TWELVE

O
NE LITTLE MOMENT
longer, the horse just stood there beneath me. Just long enough that I could entertain a universe of doubts, what would happen next; just long enough for his head to turn and his empty eye-socket to survey me, cocked at an angle that let starlight fall straight through the hollow of his skull. It was a weird night all round, but that was almost weirdest, seeing how utterly there was nothing there. Not a spark of light, not a thread of tissue, not a gesture towards human notions of how a thing might live.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but those things look like they might crunch your bones, even yours, on their way to me. Want to get out of here?”

There was still the chance that he might simply settle back into earth again and leave me stranded, eel-bait. I guess he had that option. Nothing that I’d brought, nothing that I knew to do could compel him. The libation was an invitation, nothing more; no kind of spell.

The Fay in me wanted to grip with my thighs and kick my heels into his flanks, grab a double handful of mane for security and ride the way she always had, in charge. My Aspect was like that in spades, urgent and imperative. I felt like I was fighting them both off at once, because there was just no way. This horse couldn’t be ridden. He would condescend to carry me, or else he wouldn’t. His choice.

No mane either, for Fay’s reaching hands to grab at. Only that smooth solid arching line of light that marked a passage from skull to body, that I guess you could call a neck. I guess you’d have to.

It took everything I had just to sit there and watch the eels come, while he... well. Made up his mind, I guess. Though he didn’t appear to have one. They were almost snapping at his fetlocks by the time he turned and trotted out of his own ground, up to the ridge above.

Suddenly he felt all horse beneath me, essence of horse, the pure thing unsullied. Whoever cut those lines in turf, they knew what they were doing. What they were shaping. The arrogance, the vanity, the nerves: all there. The heart, the courage, the grace and strength and willingness to work. I don’t know, I can’t imagine how the thing was done. In that moment, though, I think I knew why: for the beauty of the thing, for craft and wonder both combined. For the horse.

He was here, now, in the night and the fear and the possibility. Perhaps he had always been here, perhaps he always would be. Those were questions for another time, if I ever dared to ask them or found someone who might know. For here, for now, here and now was enough.

I didn’t kick his ribs, to suggest that he might start moving. I didn’t cling, I didn’t yell him on. I sat like Patience on a monument, on this monumental horse. He danced away from the eels, and they followed him, us, me. Us.

I might have talked to him a little then. It’s only polite, when there are two of you; it’s only practical, when you really want to embed the idea that you’re both in this together.

He might have listened. There were hollows in his skull, where ears might once have perked and twisted.

I did miss the opportunity of tugging his ears the way you do, the way Fay used to do. It’s probably just as well, though. Lèse-majesté again: one does not tug the ears of a prehistoric symbol. Or an artwork, or possibly a folly.

Eels came, and he stood still and tall; I thought that might be folly.

One eel came ahead of all the others, and did try to take a bite of light, to gnaw his leg away.

All horse, all stallion, all temper. He lashed out with that same leg, and there was a highly satisfying crunch from the eel’s head, an abrupt writhing all along its body and then a stillness.

That didn’t last. Its fellows fell on it, in that same feeding-frenzy they’d shown in the mill-stream.

Well, good.

Even so, distraction is the lesser part of valour; it doesn’t last. I said, “Now, maybe? While they’re busy, we could maybe just get out of here?”

He thought about it. I swear, he stood and thought. And then nodded his head – in an extremely horsey way, not like a person at all, not like he was actually answering me, don’t think that – and kicked at the turf with hooves he didn’t actually have, and we were away.

Y
OU COULD MAKE
a horse of the rain on the wind, all chill and bitter motion. You could make a horse of moonlight on a millpond, bright stillness over depth. You could make a horse of stone and grass, or of ink on paper, or...

I don’t know where he came from, what power guided what hands to cut the shape of him from turf on the high downs; but you couldn’t make him, no. He must have been, already. Somehow, somewhere, some state of being. Essence of horse, flowing free until he poured himself into this design, until he chose to be fixed there, to sleep out the turning years until some dangerous fool comes to wake him with whispers, a splash of mannerly whisky...