Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

When the logs were ready and the fire blazing they dragged Josh to the pile and used the tent cords to lash him spread-eagled against it. His mouth opened and closed in soundless shouts and pleadings. Sophie watched, tense, not with horror but with readiness. She had had no foreknowledge that this was going to happen. She had not brought Josh here to be a sacrifice, and would not have done so if she’d known, but she felt no guilt, only pity for his misfortune.

For herself, though, she felt excitement, eagerness, fulfilment. She was like the child of parents exiled from their country before she was born who has never herself been there, and now stands at last at a frontier station and gazes along a rail track receding through farmland, knowing that if she boards the approaching train it will take her to a life of struggle and danger, but also to the one place where she truly belongs, where she can be her whole self.

When the fire was well alight one of the creatures thrust a dry branch into it, waited for it to blaze up, and carried it flaming towards the pyre.

“Now,” said Sophie in her mind.

In the broomstick the wizand woke. Sophie knelt, crouched, sprang. The broomstick swooped into the glade.

They made no sound, but at once grey faces turned. Grey arms rose in violent gestures, but struck too late as the broomstick whistled between them, levelled for an instant, and rose with Sophie grasping the flaming branch she had snatched as they swept past. Power poured down her arm and into the wood. Its lit end blazed into brilliance, trailing a path of flame behind it as they swung round the glade. Where it had been, the flame remained suspended.

Seven times they circled, building a wall of flame around the glade, prisoning the spellbound figures. When the seventh ring was steady in its place they rose and hovered above the centre. With her bare fingers Sophie broke fiery twigs from the branch and dropped them around the pyre. Where they fell, columns of fire remained, fencing Josh round. Then the broomstick rose higher and swept again round the glade, so that Sophie could reach out with the blazing branch to touch the trees and strip from them a storm of leaves, ash, sycamore, birch, beech, and oak, that spun whirling behind her, lit both by the flame she carried and the weaker fire below.

The humming sound was gone, and the voices were clear in her head, chanting in a language she had never before heard, but whose meaning she knew as if she had spoken it since she could talk. She knew the chanting voices too. They belonged to all the wizand’s earlier symbiotes, of whom she was the latest. Their gathered power was the wizand’s power, and now, while she lived, it was hers. As understanding came to her she joined the chant.

With the first word spoken the leaves fell. They rained down between the inner and the outer fire-rings, onto the reaching arms and the upturned faces and the ponderous bodies. Where they touched the grey flesh it lost its shape and crumbled away, as the bound souls that had held the people into their shapes found their release. Before the last leaf touched the woodland floor the clay-formed mob had vanished. All that was left of them was a layer of fresh earth spread in a ring around the pyre. At the same time the flames died away and the moon shone down on a naked man struggling with the cords that bound him to a pile of logs, until a naked woman walked out of the tree shadows behind him and whispered in his ear, and he slept.

The cords untied themselves at Sophie’s touch. Effortlessly she lifted Josh free and carried him to where the tent had been. She unzipped the sleeping bag, settled him onto it, laid herself along his shuddering body, caressing the spasms into stillness. Then she whispered again in his ear.

“Wake up, Josh. You’ve been having a nightmare.”

“Jesus! Haven’t I just! Let me tell you about it!”

“Not now. In the morning. If you remember. Go back to sleep.”

Obediently he slept. Sophie saw to it that he dreamed kindly dreams. Next, at her wish, the tent reformed itself around them, retying its cords, weaving its torn fabric into seamless sheets, sinking its pegs into the earth around. The log pile stacked itself as it had been, and grass recolonised the naked layer of earth. Housekeeping. The necessary cleanings and tidyings that have to follow any intrusion of supernatural energies into the natural world. In later years Sophie would deal with this kind of thing pretty well automatically, but now, being new to the task, she had to think about what she was doing.

Last of all, amused, she raised two small irritable bumps on her left arm and let Josh drift into wakefulness. She moved his hand to finger the place.

“You win your dinner,” she whispered.

“Uh?”

“I got bitten.”

“Told you so. Don’t think I did. Great. Couldn’t be better.”

But for him it could. He woke fully and they made love again. This time, coolly, Sophie gave him not only herself, but selves of his own that he had never known were in him, strengths and delicacies, heightened senses and awareness, physical rapture too intense to last, but lasting and developing minute after minute until it died deliciously away. They lay together murmuring and caressing for a while, and then he fell asleep without any prompting from her.

Sophie turned on her back and gazed upward. Gently her fingertips stroked the two mosquito bites. If she’d chosen she could have wished them away, but she didn’t. They were a different sort of housekeeping. Her powers hadn’t been given her to win a bet, however tangential and silly. By the same token Josh must be fully paid, as she had just paid him, for what he had suffered. Simply taking the memory away would not have been enough. There would still have been a debt, though he wouldn’t have known it. No debts. No obligations. No contracts, not with anything natural, anyone human. No loves.

Instead, power. Long ago, when she had asked the wizand whether it had anything to give her besides flight and leaf-sweeping, it had told her power, but not yet. When they had first flown, she had begun to understand its meaning, discovering the joy of flight, but also, more than that joy, the thrilling exhilaration of the power to fly. The same just now. Her body had greatly enjoyed their love-making—why not?—and she had taken pleasure in Josh’s pleasure, but for her the main reward and fulfilment had been the use of her own power to give, or not to give.

And both of those things, the power to fly, the power to give, had been slight and momentary, trivial beside the thing she had discovered last night as she had swooped around the flame-ringed glade, chanting the language that is spoken both by angels and by demons, and the full weight and mass of her inheritance had poured into her, through her, out into the world, an ecstasy immeasurably beyond anything she had just given to Josh, as if she had laid her hand upon the web of forces that stays the material universe into its place, and felt that web vibrating to her touch.

She lost herself for a while, reliving the event. Slowly the memories faded and she returned to the here and now.

It was early dawn. The owls, silenced by the midnight riot, had not returned, but a couple of birds were whistling left over fragments of their full summer song. Sophie lay and thought about herself. No loves? At best, the sort of vague and already regretful affection she felt for Josh? No passions? No ecstasies? Things she could give to Josh, but not to herself? Yes, that was beyond her powers. She could have anything else, fame, wealth, love . . .

Love, without loving in return, is that love?

She sighed, and for a treacherous moment looked back. There had been a child once, difficult, wayward, passionate—what sort of life might she have had, but for the touch of an ash sapling?