The House of Storms (48 page)

D
AWN WAS COMING,
blurring the night’s certainties in slow shades of grey. It was incredibly cold, and the fire was waning. Ralph shuffled himself deeper into a rotting blanket. He wasn’t sure whether it was he or this moisture-laden air which was trembling, but the scene which quivered at its edges in the fire’s fading smoke and light was certainly feverish enough. He shivered, and coughed again. The air shook with him. Then, as the wind rose and the snow resettled and gusted, rising white from the black ground and twinkling in flakes of flame towards the black, black sky, the Beetle Lady rose herself to her feet and started shouting.

‘No, listen, No—join in…’ She stood wavering as the light and the carapaces crawled over her. ‘She’s coming, can’t you hear it? She’s coming …’

Heads which were heads nodded. Ears which were ears listened and heard. The wind gave a balehound moan.

‘Marion Price, yes, yes, I once knew her. Knew her for what she was and what she will be. Knew then that she would lead us all into this final battle. No longer Clerkenwell, no. No longer Boadicea or Goldenwhite. No longer London or Bristol. No longer East or West. She’s back in the past but here as well before us in the future present. Leading us on into the realms beyond cold and thirst. Yes, yes, I was there at the place beyond Einfell which is called Invercombe. I saw it all and believed. And listen, listen, can’t you hear the guns … ?’

Boom-ba-booom.

Ma-ri-on …

Another morning was arriving at the camp of the followers, and a man who was a priest, or who at least had assumed something resembling the raiment of one, was moving amid the bizarre throng. In his bare hands, he was carrying a shell case which had been heated on the campfire’s ashes. It took a serious effort of will for Ralph to take it when it was offered to him, but the brass was so beautifully magicked that its metal was cool. Either that, he supposed, staring into its steaming, spinning contents, or the flesh on the palms of his hands was now entirely dead. The dark swirl of hymnal wine within was threaded with twilit agitations of ghostgas. Tipping the shell case up, he swallowed and handed it back to the priest, who bore it on to the next penitent.

By now, Ralph was almost used to such rituals, and knew what would come next. First the blood, and now came the body. A huge haunch of meat which, for all the fat-dripping weight of it, he couldn’t remember seeing cooking on the fire. Some kind of ham, far bigger and richer than even the massive joints he’d found ambered in honey amid the breakfast collations at Walcote, was passed to him. Delicious strips of tendon ran eagerly through his loose teeth. Juices slipped over his chin. Part of him thought that he never tasted meat this sweetly delicious, and part of him gagged and fought to swallow, and saw that the stuff which the other followers held looked more like some unlikely jerky blackened by frost and age. But then came more of the hymnal wine, wherein most prayers are answered, and Ralph ate and drank and believed.

He was reminded of other breakfasts—of the confections of coffee and chocolate of which Helen was fond before she’d decided that she should only drink lemon juice or hot water for the sake of her thin frame. He remembered frothily swirled spirals of steam and scent filling the cool morning silence as they both studied their separate daily papers. He heard the tink of spoons against monogrammed porcelain. Glancing at her across battlefields of white cloth set with crystal emplacements of condiment, he saw that the children were also with them today for breakfast. He struck his spoon more loudly in the hope that it might catch their attention. He was dimly aware that he was dying, and felt that he owed them some sort of apology before he did.

The Beetle Lady shook him. ‘No, no. Not
death
—not
sleep.
Now listen, listen… I’ve been to the place which is called Invercombe, where the thunder beckoned. Yes, there is darkness, but beyond that… Ah, beyond that…’ Her eyes whitened. ‘Beyond that… She will lead … Listen …’

Ralph listened. Was that thunder? Was it wind? Was it guns?

Ma-ri-on.

Soon, although he’d as happily have stayed here as anywhere, it would be time to move on. He made the effort to hitch himself up from beside the dying fire. He swayed with hunger, weariness, illness and loss of sleep. He believed the Beetle Lady when she talked of Marion Price in the same way that she talked of the lost days of myth, and of a different Einfell, and of Goldenwhite’s ragged army.

He hobbled around dead trees and the fallen bodies of the still sleeping. The followers had become a sort of procession, a safety of mixed numbers and madnesses. Day by day they grew. An increasing number of soldiers had joined their company, and there were familiar morning rituals and ablutions: gun-and-harness jingle; the scrape of shovels; the scratch of heads; the curse-and-hawk-and-spit. These deserters from the East and West fitted together so easily they might never have been separated, and Ralph wondered if any of them recognised him, although, un-uniformed and hollowed-out and bearded as he now was, he doubted it.

‘Ralph Meynell?’

He stopped, turned. Someone neither quite civilian nor military was squatting on the ground. They wore a cap and a loose grey coat, and their boots, or what remained of them, lay beside their bare feet. Somewhat ruefully, they had been kneading their blistered and frostbitten toes. Oddly enough, it was those toes, and in particular their upward turn rather than anything else about her appearance, which made Ralph Meynell recognise the person he seemed to be seeing. But then, it was just as the Beetle Lady had long been saying. For where else but here, amid these followers and in this place, would you expect to find Marion Price?

T
HE POWER WAS DOWN
and had been that way since long before dawn, and the fine house, a mixture of styles and Ages, which had been requisitioned as Headquarters for the First and Second Eastern Armies over which Alice, in the matter of a few shifterms and by divers means, had assumed almost total control, was seepingly cold. The spells which had once been cast to keep up the plaster which frothed across the extravagant ceilings were failing. You could hear the crashes like cannon-fire each night as more of it collapsed. What furniture remained in the desolate rooms was crooked and unstable. The plumbing had failed, to be replaced by hosepipes, buckets and standpipes. The carpets squelched. The silk wallpapers were sloughing from the walls. In her previous visits to the front, she had always been aware of grey, grim military utility, but living amongst it was something else entirely.

Climbing out from her fold-up bed which lay in the clotted gloom cast by the huge red four-poster which was too damp to be inhabited, she winced, and waited for her head to stop spinning. The air swished about her. Jungle fronds of damp climbed the walls, greyly exploring the interstices of stone and wood and plaster. A shadow, a madly haired extension of the grainy light, she crept across the loosely carpeted floor. With a sag and a stagger, her portmanteau opened. Many of the jars were stuffed in places where they didn’t quite fit, or had crusted and jauntily angled lids. Pages and cuttings from her notebook had loosened to line the dim bottom like the fallen leaves of her own personal autumn. One day, Alice told herself, she would give the whole thing a proper clear-out. But in truth she had come to like the loose, powdery and jangling sense of disorder it now gave off. It was all hers, an entire spinning world, and here, at the heart of it, the star which they all orbited: a small, bright chalice of aether, which brightened still further as she lifted it out. The hissing in her head grew much stronger as well. The sense, the song, of the aether infused her. Almost regretfully, she laid it down on the nearby dressing table, then rummaged for the other preparations and powders she required to feed her small retort. She struck a match, lit the flame of the spirit, which fluttered, a rag of dark, against the aether’s continuing flare. Opening the lid of her gramophone’s silent, lacquered box, she laid the needle in mid-track. She slid the turntable forward with the tips of her fingers. A faint roar. Slid it back. A dim clamour of voices, more of the song …

An hour later Greatgrandmistress-Commander Alice Meynell emerged along the dank corridors. There were some advantages, she thought as she entered the briefing room, to living in this military way. The frank nearness of death, for example; the unflinching acknowledgement that it was a sacrifice which it sometimes became necessary for certain people to make. Killing people here was almost easier than keeping them alive. She listened to the wearying reports of divisional commanders or their deputies, and read the printouts and studied the arid insides of numberbeads. She touched her lips to the disastrous coffee.

She’s wearing odd earrings …

Her hair’s astray …

Why is she asking all this again, when we told her yesterday … ?

See, how her hands tremble in those gloves …

Mere wafts of thought from these sour-smelling men, kept well in check as they unrolled the maps and talked of the details of emplacements, and why should she care as long as they feared her? Outside in her car, doubly gloved and hated and blanketed, she acknowledged the troops as she was jolted painfully around potholes and the craters of mines. A pity, really, that the title greatgrandmistress didn’t convert into a chant as easily as the name of that shoregirl, who had recently taken the clever step of disappearing, and had thus removed herself entirely from the awkward businesses of being real. And this certainly wasn’t yet the world of blissfully glowing telephone lines and endless fields of bittersweet she’d always imagined she was creating. But England, for her, was a work in progress. Soon, everything would change.

After the desultory queues along the muddy, half-frozen roads and the confusions of engineering work, she found herself elated as she drew closer to the very westernmost edge of the East’s defence. Here, where the big guns waited, and the raveners were fed and the ammunition pointed its steel tips and the very earth remained unsafe, lay a refreshing sense of discovery and danger. Purpose, even—or the closest one got to it in wartime, and as she was led along duckboards to tents and temporary shelters, as she spoke to the gatherings of men, Alice could feel the rain-bowed spells of all this aethered machinery fountaining around her. They called and crooned.

The power was still down back at the damp house that evening, and the shadows stalked her as she hunched to her room, and opened her portmanteau, and undressed in the starlight cast by her aether chalice. After she had removed her un-matching earrings, and Jackie Brumby’s teardrop chain, and Cheryl Kettlethorpe’s thin silver bracelet, and the silver-threaded button from the shirt Tom had been wearing on the night of his death, she unstoppered the chalice and dabbed a little aether on her wrist where her Mark had been. Then, to the other wrist, and on her palms and neck, and the tip of her tongue and behind each ear, she dabbed some more, and felt it roar into her blood. The huge, red shadow of the four-poster bed leapt in the wyrelight. Smiling, humming, glowing, she returned to her portmanteau and lifted out the black, wyrebright pages of her greatest spell, and danced with them as they shone and slipped and slid. Then the light changed. At last, the electricity had come on, although the single bulb was more wan than today’s sunlight, and equally unwanted. She extinguished it with an easy glance, as, in a long, slow roar, her gramophone returned to life. Its song possessed nothing of the beauty of that which she was already singing, but she let the record play until the needle crackled and swished into the run-out groove. Yes, that was more like it. The music, the swish and sigh. Tides of light. Something vast breathing. Oceans and caverns. Lost summers reclaimed. Yes, Invercombe; or whatever lay beyond it. Alice Meynell laid herself down amid the sheets of her spell and the shadows of her presence, and fell smilingly towards sleep.

T
HE PROCESSION, THE GATHERING,
the snake of hunched backs and hats and heads to which now had been added varieties of wagon and handcart, along with drays and ponies in various states of malnutrition, now snaked back across the horizons of the West. Steaming and stinking, it broke into knots of arguments, surprised clusters of greeting. Flags and banners, and sheets and poles, umbrellas, even, danced aloft. There were spontaneous outbursts of sobbing and song. Most often, the Beetle Lady scampered at its front, calling and beckoning with increasing excitement that yes, this, listen, this really was the way. Some part of her, or the person she had once been, truly did recognise these roads.

The snow had vanished, but the cold had deepened. Every footstep on the sharded mud was loud, and every wheel rumble and drag of possessions rang taut over the hedgerows. If the procession moved most obviously through any element in this serely greyed winter landscape, it moved through the element of sound.

Boom-ba-boom…

Ma-ri-on …

Along its way, the followers had gathered musicians, or at least those who imagined themselves capable of making music, and each of the endlessly circling syllables was given a toot and a shriek of emphasis, and the rattle-bang of drums. The effect was hypnotic, especially now that the procession had grown so long that its rhythm staggered along the lines in echoes and decays. More than the Beetle Lady’s shrill shrieks, more than the many individual sounds which mingled into frosty distance with a chilly rumble, like a shudder of the very earth across which they were travelling, it predominated.

The woman who shared her name with this sound had hacked off her hair, and wore a thick felt cap, loose trousers bagged at the waist, collapsing boots which hurt her feet, and a split overcoat. None of it was quite enough to keep her warm even in the stumbling midst of the procession, and she would have given much she didn’t have for a decent pair of gloves, but it did mean that she was most often thought of as a man—or, when anyone made the effort to speak to her and she actually replied, as a lad. In that she radiated anything at all, it was a desire to be left alone.