Yellowcake Read online

  You’re asleep on your feet, my darling! she said.

  Billy stood the ashtray on the floor to free up a hand. He closed the door properly behind him. He came to the table and laid the rose there.

  I borrowed that, he said, hugging the toy dog to his stomach. It’s still good. Maybe you can put it in one of those special vases, the ones for one flower.

  A bud vase? And Nance was up getting one.

  Billy kept his gaze on the rose, and Corin looked him up and down. He felt he had never seen this boy before; he didn’t know what to do with him besides beleaguer him.

  He made his voice very low so that Billy would not mistake him. How did the experiments go?

  Billy gave one eye a sketchy rub. Well, he guessed everything. His hair was dull with cobwebs and sweat.

  He’s good, then? Corin felt as if he were walking out onto water, using small steps, heel-to-toe, freezing the water with his feet as he went, to make something strong enough to walk on. He’s got the powers?

  Billy looked at him. Corin thought, It’s possible I’ve not met eyes with this boy before. And how old is he? Ten? Twelve? I should know what ten and twelve look like. I should know, from my own children.

  He’s got too much powers, said Billy. Says his mum, anyway; she says he’s getting too good. She says him and Shai are like babies with a box of bombs. She’s so angry. She’s sending Jo to the You-Crane to learn from her uncle. That’s a country.

  The Ukraine? I’ve heard of it.

  Nance brought the rinsed bud vase to the table and put the rose in it.

  I really need a bath, Billy said to her. Then he blinked. So do you! And you too, Grandpa Corin. What’ve you been doing to get so dirty?

  They thought about that. Then Corin said gravely, I put the bin out.

  Nance laughed. Yes, and...and a bit of a wind came up.

  Billy looked from face to face. I told Shai Cottinden’s Hill wasn’t far enough. Nowhere we could walk to would be.

  You’ve been all the way to Cottinden’s Hill? Nance looked horrified.

  I know they felt it at Cowper Fen, Billy said to Corin. That’s why their mum came and met us.

  I think they might have felt it in the Ukraine, said Corin. I hope that uncle felt it, and comes running. He finished his tea.

  Another? said Nance.

  Yes, please.

  The empty cup gleamed in Corin’s paw.

  I know that’s fancier than you’re used to, Nance apologised, bringing the pot.

  It’s good. Corin clinked the cup onto its saucer. It’s fine.

  His ears popped and the cotton wool was gone from them. The tea clucked and pattered into the cup. ‘And then I’ll get the bath on,’ said Nance. ‘But you’ll want a smackle of something to eat, Billy. A round of sandwiches?’

  ‘You go up,’ said Corin. ‘I can do that.’

  She looked at him doubtfully. But he knew, if he let her feed the boy this time, tonight might as well not have happened.

  ‘I’ll make him one of my slabs,’ he said in the new low voice. ‘That’ll fill him.’

  She smoothed her hair and went. He heard the sounds of Billy climbing into the chair right to the walls of the kitchen, and of Nance’s feet on the stairs reverberating to the edges of the house, and beyond that was the garden and the summer night in all its size, with all its traffic of creatures and breezes and brooks and planetary light. And here he was in the middle of it, for the moment, in this house, in this room, moving from here to there gathering bread, gathering cheese and sausage and pickle, knife, board, plate—though he was not, himself, in any way, hungry at all.

  { The Golden Shroud

  I dismounted as soon as I saw the round tower, its broken crenellations, its warning flag. I hobbled Goosestep and crept forward. The forest was harmless, sun-dappled, on all sides; birds fought and fluttered in their green houses, and sang soaring above them.

  The witch’s horse was not there. I broke from the trees, readying my throat to call.

  But, ‘Ah!’ started from me, like a cry from the girl herself. The tower door was open. Light was piled golden before it, motionless fire, a weighty plaited sun.

  My horror carried me to this wreckage, and buried my arms to the elbows in it. Was it still warm? Did she lie dead above? Did the witch await me?

  Not caring—daring the witch, indeed, to present herself to me in my terror and rage—I ran in, I ran up. On a single breath, it felt, I reached the room.

  The door stood wide. All was as it should be within, except that I entered this way, and into emptiness, not by the window and into my love’s arms. How plain, how threadbare all this was without her, that had seemed such rich furnishings and so essential; how sad the little pillow on the bed where we had lain and whispered, how poor the rug, covering so few of the cold flags! And the chill! I had never felt it before. She and her hair had warmed this air before, her breath and life, the love we had built between us.

  The mad fear seized me, that as I gaped here some animal, some thief, was carrying away that treasure below, and down I ran again. No, there it lay, all sumptuous as it had ever been.

  I could not leave it, yet I could not carry such a weight— I had tried, marvelling, laughing, often enough. She herself had kept it coiled on bed or wall, roaming from its weight only so far, like a tied dog. It was a cruelty to her, even as, pegged through on the sill, it had made our meeting possible; it had been my ladder to her and my line. You can reel me in like a fish, I had laughed to her. And unsmiling she replied, Only if you are there below.

  I knelt and attacked the gold, unplaiting from the thick head-end, where the witch’s sword or scissors had hacked. The stuff fell apart, slithered side to side, transformed it seemed into other matter: cascading water, rippling cloth-of-gold. Strands of it wandered in the air and at the edges. I fought it and wept; I was in a welter of goldness, up to my knees, bogged in beauty. Perhaps if I dug far enough I would find her, curled delicate as an ear underneath all this richness.

  I did not, do I need say? The hair was spread, lacquering path and field like a syrup, materials for a thousand gorgeous bird-nests, and she was gone. It was only as I loosed the ribbon at the narrower plait-end, and unworked the last several yards from there more easily, that cold realization came, and cooled my tears and my sweat, and sat in my heart like stone.

  I lay in the slippery whorl of her hair, the spread sun on the ground, trailing and looping out into the green. I smelt, I felt, the grass through the perfumed strands pillowing my cheek. What had the old bitch done: had she killed her? Had she worse? Had she found worse than this tower and this tether of hair?

  I could not take all the hair, and I could not leave. I sat up and dashed the last cold tears from my eyes, and of one of the several strands caught in my fingers I chose the strongest and brightest. Back through the labyrinth and tangle I followed it; I found one end, and from there looped it loose around three fingers, and wound it up, the full length, becoming a brighter and a solider ribbon, knuckle to knuckle, fattening, gleaming, scented with her loveliness.

  When I had all of the strand, I bound it into itself and tucked it, narrow and bright as a bracelet made to the measure of her small wrist, into my belt-satchel with all the gifts I had brought her: the foods from the palace, a piece of fine lace I had bought her at market, the jewelled comb.

  ‘Well, this is pretty.’ The voice was cold and clear as October mornings.

  I sprang to my feet. ‘I did not hear you.’

  ‘Ah, but I heard you.’

  Never had there been a crueller contrast than the sunlit spillage about my feet with the tall woman in the edge of the shadowed wood, white-faced above her black riding-garb, her hand like a knot of bones in her stallion’s reins, himself night-black and leering.

  ‘I heard you long ago,’ she said, ‘when first you threatened to besmirch my lily. I heard you scrambling and your fondling fingers. I knew exactly and from the beginning what you sought. And that is all t
hat matters: that you should not have it.’

  ‘Why not?’ said I. ‘Why should I not have her, as my wedded wife? I am a prince, one day to be king of all lands east of here. Am I not man enough to husband her?’

  She had been surveying the hair, but she looked up at me, and gave a faint snort. ‘That girl is part of such machinations, boy, your courtly politics are but a May dance, but a nodding daffy-dilly, beside them. Tut-tut! Such a mess you have made.’ She shook her head over the hair again. ‘It will be much less easy to bear away now.’

  In the instant I glanced down at the hair myself, she was dismounted and at me. In three strides only she covered that impossible distance—I counted them even as they took no time at all. She pressed some rasping cloth or spell to my nose and mouth, that caught in my throat and closed it; she was muttering in my ear her witch-language; she was strong, all iron and leather. But I barely had time to realise I could not fight her before I was gone insensible.

  I woke immured in stone, behind an iron-barred door. I had been installed here who knew how long ago; who knew how long the witch’s spell had lasted? But all my limbs had forgotten themselves, so long had I lain. I could not tell how they were disposed. But as I woke, as I became myself again, a thread of voice sounded in my memory, a strand of sweetness, whispering: Everything she says is some variety of lying. The trick—I found my arms and pushed myself to sitting on the gritty flagstones—the trick is to look to the side of what she says, and find the truth there.

  I was not in the round tower, but a larger place of stone. Poor light, inlet by not much more than arrow-slits, showed me a stairway leading up, turning a square corner and continuing. Was this the witch’s castle? Did she prowl above? Or was this only the place she left her captives, to rot as they might, to scream at the deaf stone, the unheeding forest outside—or the sea, or the mountain steeps? Who could tell?

  ‘Am I imprisoned alone?’ I called, and no one answered. I crawled to the bars and knelt there listening, but there was no breath or cough or shifting of other persons. Silence poured thick into my ears, such nothingness as might still the very blood, if listened to for too long.

  I pulled myself to standing; I was bruised but not in any way broken. I had been flung, perhaps, over her stallion’s haunches, and carried sack-like some considerable way. For days, for months, who knew? Who knew I was not in some other time entirely, in some other enchanted place from which I might never return to my own palace, with its own cells that seemed from here such amiable places, the guards with their bowls and breads ambling about, some ne’er-do-well always protesting, or telling his adventure to his neighbour?

  A stone shelf ran low along one side of my cell, that might be seat or bed or place of torture—old shackles lay there, open, chained to the wall-stone. I went to it and experimented sitting; pains bloomed along my thighs and up my back, like lamps igniting blue and red. I drew my knees to my chest to explore the pains and stretch the muscles around them, maybe to ease them, and then I sat, a tiny cloud of breath and beating pulse in the lifelessness.

  I still had my satchel at my belt; the witch had left me that, so little did she think of me. The comb inside was broken; the garnet once the centre of a full-blown garnet rose tumbled loose in the satchel-bottom, but this I thought was only from general rough treatment, not ill-will of the witch. The food—that was what would be of use to me. I put aside the comb-parts and the garnet, and the hair-bracelet and the lace, which was now stained with the grease through the cured-salmon cloth, and I took out the foods that had only been for my love to taste and sample, not to sustain her—witch-bread and witch-meat did that. The fish was squashed but not spoiled; the cake was gone to crumbs in its cloth; the stone-fruits I had brought green so as to leave them with my love to ripen in my absence, and give her pleasure of me though I could not deliver it day by day, and they were still green, by magic or by lack of time.

  I set myself to eating the cake, as the soonest-spoiling and the longest-eating. These were rich foods; I must eke them out, for who was to say that I was not in my own world, and missed from court, and parties sent out after me? It would not take Lewin Hawk long to track me to the tower, and thence to this place. I might be several days waiting, but all might not be lost, if there were a party of men against the witch.

  The witch. The remains of her spell shuddered in my blood. Ah, but I heard you. I shook off the memory of her voice, her cold-white face. Death alone in prison I preferred to the thought of facing her again.

  My fingers paused in their crumb-gathering. They remembered—my whole hands remembered—holding the chopped end of my love’s hair. A poor job the witch had made of it, all steps and jags and hackings. She had not snipped, composed, in cold revenge, but gone at it in a rage, unthinking of the consequences in her surprise. She had not heard me at all—she had known nothing of me and suspected nothing; whatever gift or keepsake she had found, whatever word my love had dropped, unwitting, that had betrayed us, had precipitated that act of violence on the girl—there was no forethought in it at all. Everything the witch said—I put aside my cloth full of crumbs on the stone—was some sort of lie.

  The hair-bracelet glowed there, gathering and warming what little light there was. I picked it up, and in doing so loosed the hair-end I had tucked into the band after binding it. It sprang out and unwound three loops of the binding, with so much more energy than I would have credited the silky stuff that I gave it my full attention.

  I held the bracelet flat on my palm. As if shyly now, the hair continued its unwinding twirl; then, when it apprehended that I was not afraid, with more confidence it drew itself away, freeing the loops entirely and—this startled me a little, but with wonder rather than fear, and I had no wish for it to cease—shook itself into a loose spiral of moving gold. The end of it sat up like a serpent’s head above its coil, seeming to regard me.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said, for the sight of this movement and life had warmed me to hope.

  In answer, the hair-strand made a most elegant leap from my palm. Its head stayed erect, but the coils fell to the filthy floor, and then the very tip flew at the lock of my prison door, and entered there the keyhole, taking after it a certain length of the gold. Within the chambers and workings it laboured a while, until a muffled clank sounded and the door loosened in the frame. The hair passed out the other side of the lock, its closer end lashing to follow, bright as an arc of water caught by sunlight.

  I upped and went after it, out of my gaol-room. The hair kept close to grounds and corners. If it had not clearly been my love’s and my ally, I might have found quite sinister this line of light clinging and slithering ahead. Up the stairs we went, and around the square corner, and on. By the time I reached the upper door after it, the strand in its delicacy and enchantment had passed beyond it and lifted the weighty beam that made for a latch.

  It led me through all the castle’s ways. Quickly, but never too fast, it preceded me, soundless and shining along cold hall and dank corridor, dog-legged up stair and down. At one place it leaped up, and noosed itself around my knees and drew me to the wall among the shadows, while across the doorway ahead of us strode the tall black-clad figure of the witch, her own iron-grey hair plaited in a crown about her head, her face coldly preoccupied. She walked on without hesitating, quite unaware of me and my guide. So much for her having felt my presence before.

  We came to a tower door, which the golden strand negotiated with the same strength and intelligence as it had overcome other obstacles. Firmly it closed and locked the door behind us—I heard its smooth machinations within the lock as I waited on the darkened steps—and then by its faint light I walked up and around a dizzying long way, its golden zigzag fast to the wall corner beside my climbing feet.

  We passed several doors, but the one where the hair-strand broke from its zigzagging and leaped to the lock had life behind it, in the form of my love’s weeping. I pressed my hands against the wood as the magic worked in the lock, and the
n the door gave and there I was, released into a room even dimmer and narrower and poorer-furnished than had housed her before, with my poor shorn girl a-weeping on no more than a lumpy palliasse, and none too fresh-looking at that, along one wall.

  ‘Come now,’ I said, kneeling by her. ‘Come, come. What can tears achieve, my dearest?’

  I only glimpsed her tear-aglow face for a moment. Unburdened by her great hair, she flung herself up to me, weeping afresh and exclaiming into my neck. I lifted her—I could lift her now, without that rope restraining her to the ground—and carried her lightness to the arrow-slit window, and held her there for several moments of glorying, in my freedom from the witch’s penning below, in the sweetness and slenderness and live weeping warmth of my love’s embrace.

  ‘We must away, though,’ I said to her eventually.

  ‘Away?’ she said. ‘But how? How indeed came you here? Followed us on Goosestep? Oh, but I looked for you as we rode away—until she slapped me and told me keep my face forward.’

  ‘By spell and by sorcery I came,’ I said. ‘And not all that witch’s. We have a friend, my sweet. We have many friends in this castle, many strands of friends.’

  She watched me smile, wiping tear-stripes from her lovely cheek. That friend of mine, I saw, had come to her unnoticed, and lay loose around her neck, drops of salt sorrow in its strands here and there like smooth-tumbled crystals in a cunning necklace.

  I kissed her and stood her on her feet, and took her slim hand. Her freed hair sprang and swung in curls about her head and shoulders, lovelier than ever.

  ‘Let us go,’ I said.

  ‘She will prevent us, surely?’ But she followed me out the door and down the stair.

  ‘She will try, I am sure.’

  I led my lady down, into the body of the castle. Now I knew my own way, and I took us to the place where I had last seen the witch.

  Gently I covered my love’s mouth and whispered to her necklet: ‘Go, friend: find the witch and assemble your sisters against her.’