The Color of Darkness (15 page)

Well, the stick was in his hand and the grass had already heard him: he might as well turn his mistake to some good advantage.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Can any of you grasses hear me?”

There was another small, rippling gasp, and then a silence. Danny still found it much stranger talking to plants than to animals.

“I said, can you hear me?”

“Of course we can,” said a clipped voice from beside his right ear. “Do you know who you're talking to?”

“Yeah. You're the grass. I'm Danny O'Neill.”

“Danny O'Neill? But of course.”

Of course they knew it was him. Was there anything that the grass didn't know?

“I need to get somewhere,” he said, struggling into a sitting position while trying not to squash the grass too heavily.

“You need directions? We grasses know the way to almost anywhere on earth. Where is it you need to go?”

“A place called…” He swallowed. Even the name was hard to say. “A place called Chromos. Do you know how to get there?”

There was some angry muttering among the grasses, and then the same voice spoke out again.

“Chromos isn't a place on earth—you must know that. And you are Danny O'Neill. Getting involved in your schemes, whatever they are … it sits badly with some of us. Some say that you are trying to take control of the world of grasses.”

“Of course I'm not!” said Danny, sitting back on his heels. “What good would that do? This talking thing was just an accident. But Sammael's after me. He wants to kill me. I need to go into Chromos and get something to try and make him stop.”

“Sammael wants to kill you?” said the grass. “Why, for the love of oats?”

“It's a long story,” said Danny. He felt a spot of rain on his neck and looked up at the clouds, but they were white rather than gray. “Just believe me, he does. So please could you help me?”

“Well…” The grass considered for such a length of time that Danny looked back down the road again, worried that Cath's dad might have had a chance to catch up. But there was no sign of him.

After much muttering and whispering among the grasses, too tangled for him to follow, the grass that seemed to have appointed itself spokesperson said, “You do not ask
where
Chromos is, but
how
to get there. So I am supposing you know that the answers to those questions are significantly different. And we grasses know
where
Chromos is—it is over us, around us, and inside us. It is a world made by the collective minds of all the living creatures on earth, joined together. But
how
to get there—I am afraid we have less information about that. It is known that creatures can travel through Chromos on the back of a guide made by the colors, although the secret of how to call up that guide has long been lost to us. And apart from that, only Sammael can travel into Chromos. Why, we don't know. It isn't his world—he must have discovered some device or other that allows him passage, otherwise it would swallow even him up. But we don't know what that is.”

Danny tucked his chin into his sweatshirt. “And you don't have any ideas?”

“Ah, no, sorry. But there was a story, was there not, that you managed to take his coat off him? That, surely, was a thing that held much power. Where did that power come from? And how did you find out about it?”

The river in Great Butford. It had told Danny that there were many stories about the origins of Sammael's coat, some about an ox called Xur, some about the eight stags who pulled the moon across the sky—

Stags, he thought. That stag, silver in the moonlight.

“I heard some stories,” he said. “But won't this be something completely different?”

“Who knows? It might be, or it might not.”

Eight stags that pulled the moon across the sky. Maybe the stag from the woods would at least know something about that. It was the tiniest of hopes, but the only one he had.

“Okay,” he said slowly, feeling the syllables grind up from the bottom of his lungs and break reluctantly into the air. “I guess you're right. I think I know who to ask.”

There was another whispering among the grasses and the single voice floated up again.

“One last thing, Danny O'Neill.”

“Yes?”

“These are strange times. Rumors abound. And you come here asking about Chromos, and some of us are not surprised.”

A cold chill crept up Danny's spine. He knew that, whatever the grass was about to say, it wasn't going to be good.

“You humans know little of Chromos,” the grass continued. “You are closed to such things. But some are talking of a time to come, when the barrier between Chromos and earth will be broken. Not with small holes, but with one vast rip that will see the colors of Chromos pouring, pure and free, onto the earth. Who would possibly do such a thing, no one wishes to say. But if it should happen, it's certain that the humans will come off worst of all, for of all creatures they are the most blind to the true chaos of the world, and they breathe the most life into their own fears. Chromos will not help those who fear: their fears will turn on them and drive them mad. We do not tell you this to frighten you. You talk to us of Chromos—we say only that if you are involved in some scheme, if you are meddling with Chromos, you should be aware of these stories. You should consider what kind of power you are meddling with.”

The words brought Cath's eager, fearless face into Danny's mind, and for a second he watched her talking about Chromos, plunging heedlessly back into it, disappearing from the Sawtry's concrete yard. And then the vision of Kalia leapt in front of her, lips drawn back from sharp, biting teeth, and Danny knew that Cath was the odd one out, not him. He was the same as most other people, and Chromos was a dangerous place.

“I'm not meddling with it,” he said. “Although I reckon it's not hard to guess who is.”

“You are thinking about Sammael,” said the grass.

Danny got to his feet, brushing the dirt off his hands and legs, trying to swallow the dryness in his throat. He thought about the stag's silver-shadowed neck, those branching antlers.

His heart leapt with something shocked and bright.

“Yeah. But what do I know? Maybe it isn't Sammael. Maybe I'll only find out once I get into Chromos. When I do, I'll let you know.”

Wedging the front wheel of his bike between his knees, he bashed the handlebars back into position and swung his leg over the crossbar, noticing that his trousers had a huge rip down one calf. His mum wouldn't like that, but what did it matter? He wasn't going home just yet.

*   *   *

The herd of deer were grazing at the edge of the woodland among a cloud of cow parsley. The stag stood a little way off, pausing between mouthfuls of grass to raise his head and glance around, but Danny, on his belly, managed to creep to within twenty feet of the animal before he sensed him, jerked his head up, and stood alert, flaring his nostrils.

Danny gripped the stick and whispered inside his mind. “Hello?”

The stag seemed to recognize the voice as that of a deer, because he didn't run away.

“Who's that?” he said. “Are you come to challenge me?”

“No,” said Danny, wondering how far he'd get in a fight with those antlers.

“Are you known to the herd of Isbjin al-Orr?”

“No,” whispered Danny, his heart beginning to fail him. Was the stag about to challenge him to a fight?

“Identify yourself, and your business in greeting me,” said the stag, tossing his head so that his antlers appeared to shoot, for an instant, up into the white sky.

“I'm not a deer,” said Danny. “I'll come out. But please don't try and fight me.”

“What?” said the stag. “You're not a deer? Impossible. Show yourself.”

Danny got to his feet, brushing the dirt off his knees. He felt small and shabby in comparison with the stag. He could run him through with a single antler if he wanted to.

He stepped forward, treading as quietly as he could.

“I'm Danny,” he said. “Hello.”

The stag eyed him, sniffing at the air.

“I am Isbjin al-Orr, head of my herd,” he said. “But I don't understand. You are a human—a young human male, if I observe correctly—and yet you can make words and speak in sentences. It was my understanding that humans could only make a series of indistinguishable sounds and communicate the finer points of their meanings through body language. But you—you have learned to talk?”

“I could always talk,” said Danny. “People talk all the time to each other. But I can talk to you, too. Now I can, anyway.”

“But how?” asked Isbjin al-Orr, one of his front hooves tapping twice on the green earth.

“It's … it's…” Danny floundered. He'd never actually told the truth about the stick to anyone except Tom, who hadn't believed it, and he didn't particularly want to start telling the truth now. “… It's to do with Sammael…,” he said, almost stumbling over the name. “Not anything bad, though. Just to do with him, so I can talk to things.”

Sammael. What kind of an excuse was that? It left a dirty taste in Danny's mouth. He didn't want to link himself to Sammael in any way whatsoever.

A rustling in the trees made the stag turn his head and flick his rounded ears.

“What is it?”

“Just a sound,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “I listen to them all. Sammael, you say? He is a creature of our young fawns' fairy tales. How on earth would that make you able to talk to me?”

“It wasn't him, exactly,” said Danny. “I sort of … got … hit by lightning. Yes, that was it—I got hit by lightning, and then I could understand everything.”

“It's lightning now, is it? Not Sammael?” The stag flared his nostrils.

“No—well, yes, it was. Lightning. It was when Sammael could control storms, and I got struck by lightning then. So it is sort of his fault. But I don't have anything to do with him now.” Danny stopped hastily, not knowing where his lies were leading. In a moment he'd say something so preposterous that the stag might feel tempted to lower those branching antlers and thrust them toward him.

“Anyway…,” he said, trying to think of a subtle way to bring up the subject of Chromos and quickly deciding that more lies were a bad idea. “I heard about this place, Chromos, where Sammael lives. And I need to get there, so I wondered if you'd have any ideas about how he gets there.”

“I do not believe you,” said the stag. “Your tongue is certainly not silver. More an obvious shade of furry pink from what I can see. However, we deer do not hide things; it is not our way. Neither are we in the habit of inquiring into the affairs of strangers. In simple answer to you, therefore—in our stories, Sammael does not live in Chromos. He travels through Chromos to his home in the high ether. Our stories say that he has been playing with Chromos for thousands of years, ever since the death of the Great Ox, Xur.”

“
What?
” said Danny.

“Oh, it is the seventh of our legends,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “It's a tale about Phaeton, the son of Apollo, the Sun God.”

“Tell me,” said Danny. He leaned back against a tree and rested his head against the bark, breathing in the wriggling life of the woodland air.

“Very well,” said the stag, and he began.

 

CHAPTER 15

PHAETON

“So we say that back in the beginning of the world, in the time when everything was new, the Sun God, Apollo, drew the sun across the sky each day, riding in a chariot pulled by eight magnificent stags. And Apollo had a son called Phaeton.

“Phaeton was a keen, curious boy. He craved to ride with his father in the chariot, and he begged Apollo to let him climb up beside him, but Apollo always refused.

“‘There is only space for one,' he would point out. ‘Where would I put you? Would you ride on the back of a stag?' And he would laugh and turn away, and give Phateon a harness to clean.

“The truth of the matter was that Phaeton's mother was a mortal human, and Apollo knew that his son could never withstand the heat of the sun close at his back, but he didn't like to discourage the boy so early in his life so he kept him at bay with smiles and jokes.

“Phaeton grew sulky and began to desire, more than anything, to drive his father's chariot across the skies. And one morning, more silently than a mouse on a velvet carpet, he crept to the stables where the eight stags were dozing, harnessed them quietly to the chariot, then clambered up onto its narrow platform. The thick reins seemed impossibly large in his hands. He could barely close his fists around them.

“A sense of glory came upon him. As the stags stepped through the gateway, he felt as though he had found what he had been born for. I am the son of Apollo, he thought grandly. I am the son of—why, the son of the very sun itself!