Earth and Air

Wizand

Foreword

The closest analogy that i can find in the material world for the behaviour of a wizand is that of certain tropical ticks, though the similarity applies only to one part of the life cycle. These ticks hatch from eggs, go through a larval stage, pupate, emerge as adults, and mate. The male then dies. Nothing like this occurs with a wizand.

Having mated, however, the female tick climbs a grass stem or bush to a suitable height, tenses her limbs to spring, and locks the joints so that the tension is maintained with no further effort on her part. She then goes into a state that cannot be called life, since there are no metabolic processes, but is not death either. It is not known how long she can maintain this condition, but an instance of nine years is recorded.

At length the necessary stimulus—a warm-blooded animal—comes within range of her senses. Her joints unlock. The released tension hurls her forward, and if all goes well she lands on the creature’s hide, clutches with powerful claws and sinks her modified mouth structure into the skin.

She distends her body with blood—her one meal as an adult tick—and this provides her with sufficient protein to form her eggs and lay them before she too dies.


Wizands are asexual, so they do not exactly mate or reproduce. They are technically immortal, but since both of their host organisms are mortal they may perish if they fail to make the transfer to the alternate host before the previous one dies. They do not reproduce in any normal sense, but they might be considered fissiparous, since, on the rare occasions when lightning strikes an ash tree inhabited by a wizand, the wizand is likely to divide into two or more entities. This is not an event that a wizand would in any way welcome, since it involves a proportional division of power between the resulting lesser wizands, but in the old days it used to be just enough to maintain the population.

Wizands, of course, were always scarce and local, and modern forestry methods—the reduction of woodland, the decline of coppicing, and the introduction of machinery to grub out the roots of felled trees—have reduced their numbers to a point where there are probably not more than half a dozen of them left in the whole of Europe, and because of the very different life expectancy of the two hosts only one or two of these is likely to be in the active phase at any particular time.

Phase A

One afternoon, late in October l679, Phyllida Blackett sat by her hearth. Her kettle hissed on the hub. A log flared and flared again, though it had been two years drying in the shed. But Phyllida sat placidly stroking the cat on her lap as if this were an evening like any other.

As it began to grow dark she took the new broom she had cut and bound—ash handle and birch twigs—and propped it behind the door. She picked up her old broom, carried it out into the wood that surrounded her cottage, and slipped it into the hollow centre of an old ash tree.

“You bide there and take your rest,” she said. “And luck befall you next time. I’d see to that, did I know how.”

She was a thoughtful symbiote.

Later that night, as she had known they would—known from the hiss of the kettle, the flames spurting from the log, the grain of the cat’s fur—the Community of the Elect came up the hill and laid hands on her. While their minister chanted psalms in the belief that he was restraining her powers, they drove a stake into the ground, piled logs from her shed around it, and bound her to the stake with cords that had been nine days soaking in the holy water of their font. Before they fired the wood they searched her cottage, found the broomstick behind the door, and added it to the pile, but not, of course, within her reach.

A wizand has no ears, so the one in the old broomstick could not be said to have heard Phyllida’s screams, but it sensed them, as it sensed the yells and jeering of the Community, ringing the bonfire. But unlike the exulting mob it knew that the screams were not of agony. Phyllida had both power and knowledge. She had seen to it that she would feel no pain. She could, if she had chosen, have lived longer, either by moving to a different district or by using their joint power and knowledge, hers and the wizand’s, to defend her cottage. But she felt that the time was ripe. It was better to go cleanly like this than to have the Community eventually take her in her helpless senility. The wizand, of course, for its very different reasons, took the same view.

Still, Phyllida screamed. She could just have well have simply chanted the words that she wove into the screams, but then her jeering captors might have begun to doubt that they were in full control, and themselves fallen silent, and been afraid. Better to harness the anger and frustration and cruelty that streamed out of them as they watched her burn, to add that power to her own, to use it to bind their souls to this place after they died, to hold them back from both heaven and hell and fasten them to the sour clods and granite of this valley for three hundred years and thirty and three more.

Enormous energies were released by this final exercise of power. As they finished their work the wizand absorbed them into itself. At last, when the screams were silent, the Community trooped back down to their village in a single compact body, moving like sleepwalkers, and the wizand, sated, slipped out of the broomstick into the ash tree itself, found a place close above the bole where it was both safe and comfortable, and let itself drift into torpor.

Eighty odd years later a young and energetic man inherited the estate. He looked at the abandoned village at the foot of the hill, disliked its aspect, and gave orders for a fresh settlement to be built further down the stream. To provide an economic basis for the villagers he set about a general improvement of the land, the enclosure of fertile areas, and the exploitation of timber resources. Men came to coppice the wood.

As the first axe bit ringingly into the ash tree the wizand woke and glided down into the base of the bole, just below ground level. Next spring a ring of young shoots sprang from the still-living sapwood beneath the bark. They grew to wands, then poles. When they were an inch or so thick the wizand slid back up into one and waited again.

Seven times, at twenty-year intervals, the wood was fresh coppiced, but only for two or three years in each cycle were the saplings right for the wizand’s needs, and no possible host came near while that was so. By the time the timber was carted away it was long poles, thicker than a man’s calf, and the wizand, safe in the bole, waited without impatience for the next regrowth.

The economics of forestry changed again, and the coppicing ceased. It was another hundred and ten years before the ash tree was once more felled. This time it happened with the clamour of an engine, and hooked teeth on a chain that clawed so fast into the trunk that the wizand needed to wake almost fully from its torpor and hurry past before it was trapped above the cut. More engines dragged the timber away, and the shattered wood was left in peace. Next spring, as always, fresh shoots sprang up, ringing the severed bole.

Phase B

A man’s voice.

“These look about the right size. Which one do you want, darling?”

Another voice, petulant with boredom.

“I don’t know.”

The second voice triggered the change. Instantly the wizand was fully alert, waiting, knowing its own needs, just as a returning salmon knows the stream that spawned it. It guided the reaching arm. Through the young bark of the sapling it welcomed palm and fingers. The hand was very small, a child’s, about seven years old, but now that the wizand was properly awake it saw how time was running out. There was little chance of another possible host coming by, and none of the ash tree being coppiced again, before the appointed hour.

“This one,” said the child’s voice, firmly.

A light saw bit sweetly in. The wizand stayed above the cut.

“I’ll carry it,” said the child.

“If you like. Just don’t get it between your legs. Or mine. Now what we want next is a birch tree, and some good hemp cord. None of your nasty nylon—not for a witch’s broom.”


When the children came in from their trick-or-treating the several witches piled their brooms together. As they were leaving, a child happened to pick out the wrong one. She let go and snatched her hand back with a yelp.

“It bit me,” she said, and started to cry, more frightened than hurt.

“Of course it did,” said Sophie Winner. “That’s my broom. It won’t let anyone else touch it.”

They thought she was joking, of course, and later that evening Simon and Joanne Winner found it gratifying that Sophie was so pleased with her new broom that she took it up to bed with her, and went upstairs without any of the usual sulkings and dallyings.

Sophie dreamed that night about flying. It was a dream she’d had before, so often that she thought she’d been born with it.


The wizand was always cautious with a fresh symbiote. The revelation, when it came, was likely to be a double shock, with the discovery both of the wizand’s existence, and of the symbiote’s true self. But hitherto the girl had always been around puberty. It had never dealt with a child as young as Sophie, with her preconceptions unhardened. If anything, it was she who surprised the wizand.

A fortnight after Halloween she took her broom into the back garden, saying that she was going to sweep the leaves off the lawn.

“If you like,” said her father, laughing. “They’ll blow around a bit in this wind, but give it a go.”

He went to fetch his video camera.

The wizand could have swept the lawn on its own, but with her parents watching through the patio window Sophie kept firm hold of it, following its movements like a dancing partner, while it used the wind to gather the leaves into three neat piles in places where they would no longer blow around.

“It’s wonderful what a kid can do by way of work, provided she thinks she’s playing,” said her father. He was the sort of parent that hides from himself the knowledge that his relationship with his own child is not what it should be by theorising about the behaviour of children in general.

When she’d finished, Sophie went up to her room and sat cross-legged and straight-backed in the middle of the floor, with the broom across her thighs and her hands grasping the stick at either end. She waited.

“Yes?” said the wizand.

Sophie heard the toneless syllable as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud, but knew that it hadn’t come to her through her ears. She answered in the same manner, inside her head.

“I knew you were there. The moment I touched the tree. I felt you.”

“Yes.”

“What are you? A demon or something?”

“Wizand.”

Sophie accepted the unfamiliar word without query.

“Am I a witch?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Can we fly?”

“Yes.”

“We’d need to be invisible.”

“No.”

“But . . . Oh, you mean you can’t do that? Couldn’t I?”

“Not yet.”

“You can fly, and you can sweep. Anything else?”

“Power.”

“Oh . . .”

“Not yet.”

Sophie felt relieved. She didn’t know why.

“We’d better wait for a dark night,” she said.


Sophie chose a Friday, so that she could lie in on Saturday morning. She went to bed early and waited for her parents to come in and say goodnight. As soon as the door closed behind them she fetched her broom from the corner beside the wardrobe.

“They won’t come back,” she told it. “Let’s go.”

“Sleep,” said the wizand.

“Oh. It won’t be just dreaming again? We’re really going to do it?”

“Yes.”

Sophie climbed into bed with the broom on the duvet beside her, closed her eyes and was instantly asleep. The wizand waited until it sensed that the parents were also sleeping, then woke her by sending a trembling warm sensation into her forearm where it lay against the ash wood. She sat up, fully aware.

“Can we get through the window, or do we have to go outside?” she asked. “I’d need to turn off the burglar alarm.”

“Window.”

She pushed the sash up as far as it would go and picked up the broom again.

“Naked,” said the wizand.

“Oh, all right.”

Her parents considered Sophie a prudish child, but she unhesitatingly stripped off her nightie. As soon as she touched the broom again her body knew what to do. Both hands gripped the handle near the tip. She straddled the stick, as if it had been a hobby horse, and laid herself close along it, with the smooth wood pressing into chest and belly. A word came into her mouth that she had never before spoken. She said it aloud, and as the broom moved softly forward and upward she hooked her right ankle over her left beneath the bunched birch twigs. Together they glided cleanly through the window and into the open.

It was a chilly February night, with a heavy cloud layer releasing patches of light drizzle, but Sophie felt no cold. Indeed her body seemed to be filling with a tingling warmth, and as their speed increased the rush of the night air over her skin was a delectable coolness around that inward glow. Flying was like all the wonderful moments Sophie had ever known, but better, realer, truer. This was what she was for. Thinking about it beforehand she had imagined that the best part would be looking down from above on familiar landmarks, school and parks and churches small and strange-angled beneath her; but now, absorbed in the ecstasy of the thing itself, she barely noticed any of that until the lit streets disappeared behind her and they were flying low above darkened fields, almost skimming the hedgerow trees.

The broomstick swerved suddenly aside, and up, curving away, and then curving again and flying far more slowly.

“What?” it asked.

Sophie peered ahead and saw a skeletal structure against the glow from the motorway service station.

“Pylons,” she said. “Dad says they carry electricity around.”

The broomstick flew along the line of the wires, keeping well clear of them, then circled for height and crossed them with plenty of room to spare. Beyond them it descended and skimmed on westward, rising again to cross the motorway as it headed for the now looming hills.

It rose effortlessly to climb them, crossed the first ridge and dipped into a deep-shadowed valley. Halfway down the slope it slowed, circled over a dark patch of woodland, and settled down into a clearing among the trees. The moment Sophie’s bare feet touched earth the broom became inert. If she’d let go of it, it would have fallen to the ground.

She stood and looked around her. It was almost as dark in the clearing as it was beneath the trees, though they were mostly leafless by now. An owl was hooting a little way down the hill. Sophie had never liked the dark, even in the safety of her own bedroom, but she didn’t feel afraid.

“Can I make light?” she said.

“Hand. Up,” said the wizand.

Again her body knew what to do. She raised her right arm above her head, with the wrist bent and the fingers loosely cupped around the palm. Something flowed gently out of the ashwood into the hand that held it, up that arm, across her shoulder blades, on up her raised arm, and into the hand. A pale light glowed between her fingers, slightly cooler than the night air, something like moonlight but with a mauvish tinge, not fierce but strong enough to be reflected from tree trunks deep in the wood.

There was nothing special about the clearing. It was roughly circular, grassy, with a low mound to one side. A track ran across in front of the mound. It didn’t look as if it was used much. That was all. But the clearing spoke to her, spoke with voices that she couldn’t hear and shapes that she couldn’t see. There was a pressure around her, and a thin, high humming, not reaching her through her ears but sounding inside her head, in the same way that the wizand spoke to her. She wasn’t afraid, but she didn’t like it. She wasn’t ready.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

“Yes,” said the wizand.

On the way back the rapture of flight overcame her once more, but this time there was a small part of her that held itself back, so that she was able to think about what was happening to her. It was then that she first began to comprehend something central to her nature, when she saw that the rapture arose not directly from the flying itself, but from the ability to fly, the power. That was what the wizand had meant, when it had first spoken to her. Power.


Sophie was an intelligent and perceptive child, but hitherto, like most children, she had taken her parents for granted. They were what they were, and there was no need for her to wonder why. The coming of the wizand changed that, because of the need to conceal its existence from them. This meant that Sophie had to think about them, how to handle them, how to make sure they got enough of her to satisfy them, so that they didn’t demand anything she wasn’t prepared to give. Soon she understood them a good deal better than they did her, and realised—as they didn’t, and never would—that there was no way in which she and they could ever be fully at ease with each other. It wasn’t lack of love on their part, or at least what they thought of as love, but it was the wrong sort of love, too involved, to eager to share in all that happened to her, to rejoice in her happinesses and grieve for her miseries. It was, she saw, a way of owning her. She could not allow that.

Obviously this wasn’t anything she could explain to them, but just as obviously it would be no use her shutting herself up in her room for hours, alone with her broom. She mustn’t even make a particular fuss of it—no more fantastic feats of leaf-sweeping—so she wrote a label for it, “Sophie’s Broom. Do not touch,” and propped it into the corner behind the wardrobe. She made a point of being around whenever she guessed her parents would like her to be, so that they’d be less likely to come looking for her at other times. To minimise intrusions in her absence she started to keep her room clean and neat, and to fold her clothes and put them away.

Her moodswings became less marked, and she went to bed at the right time without making a fuss—or mostly so, because sometimes she’d throw a minor tantrum, enjoying it in a rather cold-blooded way, so that they wouldn’t start to feel that they no longer had the daughter they were used to. So family tensions eased, and life became more comfortable for all three of them. Her parents, of course, believed that this was their doing, and congratulated themselves on their patient handling of her.

They were delighted, too, by her sudden hunger for books. She had been slow to start reading, but now caught up rapidly with her age group and overtook most of them. It barely mattered what the book was about. Anything satisfied the hunger, at least momentarily, and then it was back, strong as ever.

“I suppose witches have to read a lot, to learn how to do stuff.”

“Yes.”

“The trouble is, there don’t seem to be that sort of books any more. And there aren’t any witches to teach me, either. I mean, not my sort. There are those ones on TV who dance in circles and do chants to the Earth Mother, but that’s different.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose what you’re used to is someone like me going to grown-up witches to learn stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Well, there aren’t any. Not anymore. You’d feel them, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I would. I don’t know how I would, but I would.”

“Yes.”

What the wizand in fact sensed was a change far more profound than the mere absence of active symbiotes, and more profound too than the obvious physical changes—the chain saw that had felled the ash tree, the huge contraptions that could fly far higher and faster than any broomstick, the flameless warmth in the houses, the night-time glow over the cities—those were superficial. The major change was in people’s minds, their hopes, fears, understandings, beliefs, disbeliefs. The people who had burnt Phyllida Blackett hadn’t known about wizands, but if they had found out they would not have been astonished. To them a wizand would have been something classifiable, a species of wood-demon, to be feared, perhaps, and if possible destroyed, but not incredible. To the people of Sophie’s time a wizand was literally that—incredible. There was no place in their minds for such a concept.

So the wizand’s first task in this new cycle was to discover as much as it could about those minds, and the only channel through which it could do this was Sophie. Hence her hunger to read. The wizand was not in fact troubled about her education as a witch. Her powers would come.


Time passed. The family moved south. When Sophie was thirteen her mother came into her room one evening and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes shut and her old broomstick—the one Simon had made for her for that Halloween party at the Cotlands’—across her thighs, and her hands grasping either end. The pose looked otherworldly, hieratic, and in a curious way adult, or possibly ageless.

Sophie opened her eyes and smiled, perfectly friendly, but made a silent “Shh” with her lips. Her mother returned the smile and backed out.

“Sorry to shoo you out like that, Ma,” Sophie said when she came downstairs. “I was just meditating. Belinda does it, and I thought I’d give it a go.”

“With your old witch’s broom?”

“The woman who explained it to Belinda says it’s sometimes useful to hold onto something—something natural’s best—Belinda uses a rock from the beach—and you sort of put your everyday stuff into that and tell it to stay there while the rest of you gets on with meditating. Anyway, my broomstick feels right. I knew it when it was a tree, remember.”

“Maybe I should try it.”

“If you can sit still for long enough. It’s supposed to calm you down.”

“You don’t need it then. You’re the calmest person I’ve ever met. I don’t know where you get it from.”

“I have to make up for you and Dad. Shall I lay the table?”

The bit about Belinda was true, except that Belinda had given up the experiment several months ago. Sophie had kept it in reserve as an explanation, if ever she needed it. And she wasn’t surprised by what her mother had said about her calmness. Her friends had commented on it, and she was aware of it in herself. Nothing that happened to her, or might happen, moment by moment, was of any weight compared to her knowledge of what she was, or rather would be. She was like a seed, waiting to become a tree.

So, apart from giving in around the end of each October to what seemed to be a seasonal itch to fly, she made no practical use of the broomstick. Instead, every evening, she “meditated” with it across her lap. At first she merely passed on to the wizand all she had learnt during the day, not merely schoolwork and reading, but her interchanges with people, their sayings and doings. Later, when she had had her first period, she began to acquire her powers.

The wizand didn’t exactly give them to her. They were there, and it showed them to her. It was as if it had shown her how to open a box of specialised instruments. They were, in fact, more like that than anything else she could think of. Though incorporeal, they seemed to her to have the shape and feel of old tools, used and reused by long-dead craftsmen, blades honed and rehoned, handles smoothed and made comfortable to grasp by the endless touch of confident, work-hardened fingers. They were also a kind of knowledge, like mathematical formulae such as builders have used since before the pyramids, but those are things that anyone can acquire. These were Sophie’s, and Sophie’s alone, just as they had belonged exclusively to each of the long line of the wizand’s earlier symbiotes. That was why they were more like tools than formulae. Some of their shapes were very strange. It might be years before Sophie discovered what they were all for.


More time passed. When Sophie was fifteen she surprised her parents by telling them that she wanted to be a doctor. Simon was a designer, Joanne a history teacher, and they had assumed that when she went to University she would read English, or something like that. But she seemed both assured and determined, as she did about most things, in her quiet way, so they agreed to her taking the necessary A-levels. The wizand, of course, approved. Medical knowledge, though the knowledge itself had changed, was something within its experience. Sophie’s reasons were similar. Healing was one of the things witches did. Medicine would provide a front. Witchcraft might help the healing process. So she worked hard, and got the results she needed in order to have some choice in the university she would go to, back in the north, where both she and the wizand belonged.

She took the broomstick with her and hung it on the wall of her room. Nobody thought this strange. Students keep all sorts of junk as totemic objects. Most days she meditated. This was equally normal. She made friends, easily, with anyone she liked the look of. It just happened, with no special effort on her part. More unnervingly—though it took a lot to unnerve her, these days—she found that she had only to look at some man with a feeling of mild physical interest on her part, and within a week or two he would have taken steps to get to know her, and be giving clear signals of wishing for something more, though she herself was merely borderline pretty, and that on her best days. She needed the presence of the man himself for this to work. It was no use going to a film and fantasising about Tom Cruise, but if he had happened to be visiting Leeds . . . No, once she’d discovered the effect, she’d have stayed clear. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.

After a while, very much in a spirit of sober experiment, she allowed some of these encounters to go further. The results could be physically satisfying, but not emotionally, because the men seemed unable to remain at her superficial level of involvement. Instead, whether she went to bed with them or not, they seemed to become not merely passionate but obsessed. She tried the obvious step of initiating the relationship via a carefully controlled fantasy, with definite rules of engagement, but it made no difference.

“Yes,” said the wizand, when she told it.

“You mean that’s just how it goes? It’s no use trying to get them to understand I don’t want them to feel like that about me.”

“Say they don’t,” suggested the wizand.

“All right,” said Sophie. “I’ll give it a go.”

She chose an archaeology student called Josh, already on the fringe of her circle, a healthy outdoor type with an affable personality. He had the advantage of being emotionally at a loose end, because his long-time girlfriend had decided to go and be a vet in New Zealand. He was standing at the bar in a pub talking rugby with his mates, with his back to Sophie, when she fantasised about spending a night with him in a tent in an owl-infested wood. Ten minutes later he was sitting at her table. Within a week they were lovers.

She let his passion run for another ten days and then, one morning while they were dressing for his ritual run (she bicycled beside him for company), she took him by the hands and said, “Look me in the eyes, Josh.”

He did so, frowning.

“Josh,” she said slowly and quietly, “you don’t love me anymore.”

His frown deepened. He shook his head, naively bewildered.

“No,” he said. “I suppose I don’t. I’m sorry, Sophie.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s fine by me. We can go on as we are, if you want to. Just taking it easy on the emotional bit, if you see what I mean.”

“All right,” he said. “I suppose it was getting a bit unhealthy.”


Sophie found the change a considerable improvement on her previous relationships, but it was still not fully satisfying. Josh made the point one evening, speaking thoughtfully out of a long silence.

“You’ve never been in love, have you, Sophie?”

“No, I suppose not. Not yet.”

“I don’t think you know how. You’re just too cool. Not quite human.”

She’d laughed, but inwardly accepted the point. Not quite human. Something else.

Despite that, the relationship worked for both of them, a steady companionship without emotional commitment. (Josh was planning to go out to New Zealand when his course ended, if his girlfriend didn’t return before that.) So they were still together at the end of the academic year, and settled in as before at the start of the next term. Towards the end of October they took advantage of a late fine spell to go camping for a long weekend. Sophie chose the location, a valley merely glimpsed on a summer jaunt into the western hills, though the memory of that glimpse had kept sidling into her mind at irrelevant moments since. As she meditated the evening before they left the wizand said “Take me.” It didn’t occur to her not to do so.

They left the motorway and climbed a side road to a col, then began to descend a boulder-strewn hillside, bare apart from a large patch of old woodland a couple of hundred yards away on the left. Seen from this angle, Sophie recognised the place, recognised it from a single visit thirteen years before, a sulky child, slumped in the back of the car, barely glancing out of the window.

“Try along there?” she said.

“It doesn’t look . . .”

He had already passed the turning. She was forced to use a little of her power, something she had avoided doing to him so far. She laid her fingers on his bare forearm.

“Please, Josh,” she said.

He braked, reversed, and turned along the track. It was evidently not much used. The weeds along the centre rasped against the underside of the car. In places, anthills had encroached. Apart from the crawling car the hillside seemed entirely empty. Two sagging strands of rusty barbed wire blocked the entrance to the wood. Josh stopped and craned round to check for a turning place, but Sophie was already out of the car.

“For heaven’s sake . . .” he called as she disentangled the loose post at one side of the entrance and dragged the wire clear, as she’d seen her father do thirteen years ago. She heard his call as if from much further away, but ignored it and walked on into the wood.

Fifty yards in, the track crossed a clearing, floored with the sort of fine, pale grass that grows in places mainly shadowed from the sun. To the right of it, at the edge of the trees, rose a low mound with a dip in the centre. There was a pile of cordwood stacked beside the track, ready for carting away.

Sophie stopped and looked around. Now there were two layers of recognition, both from thirteen years before, two visits, once by daylight with her father, once at midnight with the wizand. She hadn’t connected them at the time, but now the memory of the second visit was far the stronger. She could hear, though far more faintly this time, the same high humming inside her head, and feel that nameless pressure all around her.

Josh came up behind her.

“What’s up?” he said

He was so good natured that crossness didn’t sound right in his voice—more as if he were putting it on because she was treating him badly and it was his duty to be cross about it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just remembered. I came here once with my father. I went into a sort of daze, remembering. I suppose that’s some sort of burial mound over there.”

“Don’t get them round here. It’s probably a collapsed building. The high bit outside was the walls, and the dip’s where the roof fell in. There’s a deserted village down by the stream, if I’m thinking of the right place. Doctor Wedlow was going to lead a dig there, but something stopped it.”

“Can we camp here?”

He sighed. It wasn’t his idea of a camping place. He liked open, windy uplands.

“If you want to be eaten to death by mosquitoes,” he said.

“There won’t be any. I bet you.”

“How much?”

“Dinner at Shastri’s?”

“So I’ve got to be eaten before I can eat? Oh, all right. I’ll get the car.”

“Don’t bring it all the way. Leave it on the track.”

She didn’t move. Dimly she heard the engine start, and stop. Josh’s voice spoke behind her.

“What on earth did you put this in for?”

She didn’t trouble to turn and look.

“It’s due some fresh birch twigs. I’ll use the old ones to light the fire.”

Sophie pulled herself out of her half trance and helped set up the tent, and then to gather firewood. Josh liked to cook on these occasions, so she left him to fry sausages and chips and construct one of his pungent sauces while she cut twigs from a fallen birch beside the track. As she sat cross legged with the broomstick across her lap and shaped and bound the bundle into place, the yellow circular leaves fell from the twigs and scattered in a pattern around her, like iron filings round a magnet.

“Wake,” said the wizand in her mind.

“How long?”

“Before midnight.”

They opened a bottle of Rioja and ate by firelight, then sat companionably with a Jean Redpath tape playing, accompanied by owls, while they finished the wine. The high humming was louder now in Sophie’s head, neither threatening nor benign, but with a meaning she couldn’t interpret. She was aware, too, that she was using Josh for some purpose of the wizand’s, and therefore of hers, but she didn’t yet know what it was. Though she felt no guilt about this, she knew she must have no encumbrances, and therefore must repay all debts, so she troubled to attend to Josh and fit cheerfully into his mood, and when they went to bed to see to it that he was well satisfied. By now three owls were hooting from different parts of the wood and she could almost hear the mutter of a voice whispering some chant beneath the humming sound.

She knew at once when the time came, and turned Josh onto his back, leaned over him, pulled both eyelids down with her fingertip, whispered “Now sleep,” and kissed him. Before she had withdrawn her lips he was asleep.

She wormed out of the sleeping bag and crawled naked from the tent. The broomstick leaned by the entrance. She took it to the mound, straddled it, leaned forward and whispered the word. The broomstick surged forward and up in a tight spiral to clear the trees. It was a full moon night, very bright, on the verge of frost. A few lights still glowed from the village a mile down the valley, and others speckled the darkness of the opposite slope. The broomstick headed directly downhill, flying only a few feet clear of the treetops.

Below the wood was a stretch of bare slope, and then small, stonewalled fields running along the bottom of the valley. Among them was an isolated copse, much smaller but even darker than the wood they had left. The broomstick headed directly for it, and as they came nearer Sophie saw that the trees were ancient yews, unlikely to be found growing wild in such a place, though there was no visible reason why anyone should have planted them there. A large modern prefabricated shed stood in the corner of the next field.

“There,” said Sophie.

The broomstick swung aside, skimmed the roof of the shed, slowing all the time until she could alight as if from a still gently moving bicycle. At once it lost all buoyancy and became an apparently inert object. She laid it down and settled herself at the edge of the roof with her legs dangling into space, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist. The shed stood in its own patch of ground, rutted with wheel tracks and cluttered with bits of farm machinery, most of them engulfed in a tangle of brambles and nettles. The yew copse was immediately beyond the fence. The humming in Sophie’s head had quieted as soon as they had left the clearing, to be replaced by a tenseness of expectation, a heavy stillness that spoke to her, saying “Wait.” She was strongly aware of this being the appointed place and hour, but knew nothing of the event, and did not try to guess.

Time passed, enough for the moonshadows on the mat of ivy beneath the yews to have visibly shifted before the church clock in the village down the valley began to strike the midnight quarters. As the chimes floated past her the nape of Sophie’s neck crawled, and her jaw muscles stiffened. She swallowed twice to ease them, then rose and moved back, crouching to peer over the rim of the roof. Her hand felt for the broomstick and gripped it.

In the pause that followed the quarters the ivy seemed to stir, as if a lot of small creatures were scurrying among it. As the first stroke of the hour reached the forgotten cemetery the tangled mat erupted and burst apart and the buried but never fully dead Community crawled into the air. The chill of the night changed its nature as the clean winter air mingled with the heavier cold of deep earth.

There was no reek of decay, because the flesh had not decayed, though the shrouds in which it had been buried had rotted centuries ago. But the bodies had held their shape, absorbing into themselves the weight and dullness of the clay in which they had lain, until they had become something like soft fossils.

Now they rose and moved into the open, grey in the moonlight, naked. They stared around. Who knows what they saw? The shadowy roofs and walls of the village where they had lived their human lives? Or the night as it now was, with only the old yews to mark their graveyard, and the strange-shaped modern barn beside it?

Sophie saw the grey faces begin to turn towards her and ducked down out of sight. Her throat was dry and her heart hammered. In her night flyings in other years she had felt the excitement of adventure, but never any fear, because she had always had the confidence that her powers, with the wizand’s, were more than enough to keep her out of danger. But this time she understood she was in the presence of something whose power, whatever it consisted in, was at least equal to her own.

Carefully she raised her head and looked again. The Community were beginning to move now, all together, a grey mass shapeless as a cloud, crashing through the hedge into the lane, and on through the wall on the other side, tumbling the heavy stones out of their way, then on up the hill, following an ancient track untrodden for three hundred years. There was a gap in the next wall, blocked with barbed wire. The hooked points tore into their flesh as they strode through it, but no blood came. They crossed more fields and started up a bracken-shrouded slope.

The broomstick twitched in Sophie’s hand. She straddled it, laid her body along it and spoke the word. The broomstick swept away and climbed the hill, well to the left of the line the Community was taking. They reached the wood together, and Sophie heard the crash of trampled undergrowth as the heavy remorseless limbs forced their way in under the trees. The broomstick skimmed the treetops, its new-cut birch twigs whistling sweetly wild as they sped through the still night air.

It slowed above the clearing and spiralled down, but before it reached the ground veered upward like a settling bird, allowing Sophie to reach out and grasp the side-branch of a sycamore bough that partly overhung the space below. Before the broomstick lost buoyancy she found a scrabbling foothold and managed to heave herself onto the main bough. She worked herself along it to a point where she would be clear for takeoff, laid her naked body against the flakey bark and drew the broomstick in beneath her right thigh.

The midnight moon shone down into the glade, lighting the tent where Josh lay asleep, and the logpile, and the mound that might once have been a dwelling. A silvery wisp of smoke still rose from the embers of the fire. The strange hum was back inside Sophie’s head, quiet but persistent, with the chanting voice almost audible beneath it. No, more than one voice, several, chanting in unison, strong, quiet voices, certain of what they were doing, as Sophie was not yet certain.

The sounds of trampling drew nearer. Beneath her leg, Sophie felt the broomstick lose the tingle of secret life that was always there when she touched it.

“Hide,” came the toneless voice in her mind.

Yes, she thought. I too have powers that these creatures might sense. She could indeed feel those powers wavering around her, like the tentacles of an anemone in a rock pool, so, just as an anemone does when its pool is disturbed, she retracted the charged network into herself and closed it away. A moment later the leaders of the Community crashed out into the open.

They paused. The grey faces stared at the glade, expressionless, but Sophie sensed a sudden check to the impulse that had drawn them here. They had come to do a particular thing, and found that thing no longer doable. Now they drifted across to the mound. Their groping arms patted the empty air, feeling for lost walls, a vanished door.

They turned and stared around again. For the first time they seemed to see the tent, and drifted towards it. Hands clutched the fabric and wrenched it away. Josh, locked in the sleep spell, didn’t stir. They ringed him round, staring down.

Without word or signal certainty returned. Clay-chill hands seized Josh by the shoulders, dragged him from the sleeping bag and hauled him to his feet. He half woke and stared around, too bewildered for fear. His naked body was bone-white in the moonlight. While two of the creatures held him others turned to the woodpile. They carried the logs to the centre of the clearing and stacked them into a pyramid. Another crouched by the smouldering fire and blew on the embers. Others broke brushwood and piled it on, or stuffed it in among the logs. Smoke rose from the fire, silver white. A flame woke and flared, lighting the glade orange, but the grey bodies showed no tinge of it. Their stuff absorbed the light and sent none back.

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?

If she had wished, Sophie could have summoned out of this very wood the stuff that had been Phyllida Blackett—ashes burnt over three hundred years ago, washed into this earth by winter rains, drawn by summer suns into branch and leaf, fallen and rotted into the earth again, cycle after cycle—summoned them and reformed them and caused Phyllida Blackett to walk once more across this glade, no wraith but the living flesh. It would have taken a tremendous exercise of power, but the power was there, hers.

So, surely, it would have been simple by comparison to call back the child Sophie had been, merely the spirit, for the flesh was already here, now, in this tent, and to let the child inhabit the flesh, imbue it with her old, passionate nature, so that she could love as well as be loved, love Josh, if for a season only, for these two days out only . . .

She wasn’t conscious of having reached out and grasped the broomstick where she had laid it beside the sleeping bag, but she found she had done so, and now the wizand interrupted the reverie, speaking in her mind.

“No. I.”

Automatically Sophie interpreted the two cryptic syllables, but the toneless voice in her head told her nothing of the wizand’s own satisfaction at another phase in its life cycle safely embarked on in last night’s orgasm of transferred powers.

No, that is not for you. Never. I am your lover. I alone. I.

Phase A

Suppose Sophie had chosen, as she now had the power to, to look a generation or two into the future and see what would then have been happening in this glade where she lay, and in the valley beneath it, what might that future have been? If we assume no huge disrupting changes in the culture of the British Isles, and no accident to herself against which even her accumulated powers could not protect her, it would have been something like this:

In the glade itself, on the site of the present mound, stands a modest dwelling, made of modern materials but still very much in the spirit of the cottage in which Phyllida Blackett once lived, small-windowed, neat and unpretentious. Around it, growing surprisingly stoutly in so shaded a spot, is an orderly vegetable garden that includes a large plot of herbs, not all of them culinary.

A woman comes to the door. She is in late middle age, soberly dressed, well kempt and apparently healthy. Despite that there is a worn look about her, not tired, not tense or fretted, but with something of the air of a mediaeval statue on the west front of a great cathedral, purified by time and tempest, though in the woman’s case the weather she has endured has been internal.

She has a broom in her hand with which she sweeps her doorstep. She replaces it behind the door and goes into the wood. There is no need to lock the door. Those brush strokes are ward enough.

Sophie’s foreseeing eye doesn’t follow her, but instead transfers its gaze to the village down the hill. Here not much has visibly changed. The public telephone box is a different shape and colour and is topped by a satellite dish. Most cars are electrical, and so on. But very few of the houses have been much altered, and despite the huge increase, nationwide, in the size of the average village, no new building has taken place here. It looks like a village where nothing much has happened for a long while.

Despite that, it has recently been in the news, thanks to a violent and public squabble between the vicar and his bishop, all the more surprising as the vicar has hitherto been one of those elderly ineffectual priests, drifting towards retirement, and meanwhile conducting soporific church services attended by only a handful of his older parishioners, out of habit. Why should such a man suddenly be granted a vision and a voice, the vision having more, apparently, to do with Satan than with God, but the voice so emphatic, so convinced and convincing, that parishioners who have attended the odd service out of curiosity to observe the change, have continued to come with steadily increasing fervour? And when the bishop, hearing of this, has suggested to the vicar that some of the views expressed are verging on the heretical, have united behind him so unanimously that visiting journalists, looking for a jolly row between entrenched local worthies, have not been able to raise a single quotable slur?

These are early days still. It will be several years before the congregation definitively secedes from the mother church, and becomes more and more exclusive and reclusive as it unconsciously prepares itself to play its part, as necessary to the wizand as either of its two symbiotes, in what will perhaps be the final recurrence of that cyclical outburst of public witch frenzy that has so puzzled the historians of mediaeval Europe.

But it is not necessary to the wizand that Sophie should foresee any of that, and so she chooses not to.