Noah stared at them, then she smiled, and relaxed even further. “I had forgotten, both of those things. Ah, what is the matter with me? Maybe we have a chance, after all.”
On the afternoon of Friday the eleventh of April Jack and Grace were walking through Epping Forest when the White Queen appeared to them.
She startled them so greatly, suddenly appearing on the path as they turned a corner, that both of them jumped and gasped.
“Next week,” the White Queen said, not giving either a chance to speak. “Wednesday the sixteenth.”
“What?” Jack snapped. “Should we expect the second coming then?”
To his and Grace’s surprise, the White Queen’s mouth actually twitched in a smile.
“You can expect a large raid that night,” she said. “A very powerful one.”
Grace glanced at Jack, then looked back to the White Queen. “You want us to open your Game that night.”
“Are you ready?” the White Queen said.
“To open the Game, yes,” said Jack.
Again the White Queen twisted her mouth in a smile, but this time it was humourless. “And when shall you be ready to finish it?”
“Soon,” said Jack.
“You have a month,” said the White Queen. “The best time to close it, and to trap the Troy Game, will be the night of the tenth of May.”
“Another air raid,” said Jack. “No doubt destructive.”
“You need all the power possible,” said the White Queen. “Are you not capable of handling it?”
“I am sickened by it,” said Jack, “knowing what horror it wreaks.”
“You cannot warn people,” said the White Queen. “To warn them will be to warn Catling.” Then she took a step forward. “Will you be ready, father-Jack, to close out my Game in a month’s time? Can you do it?”
Without giving him time to answer, the White Queen swung her cold black eyes to Grace. “Are you ready, Grace? Ready to do what is needed, even though you will be trapped in the—”
“She will be saved,” said Jack.
“Really?” said the White Queen, and then she vanished.
Really? The word rustled about them, twisting away on the wind, and Jack took Grace’s hand, and smiled at her.
“Really,” he said, his voice solid with certainty.
She did not return his smile.
FIVE
The River Thames
Wednesday, 16th April 1941
The Luftwaffe swept in just after eight in the evening with over six hundred bombers dropping parachute flares over the city. There was high but light cloud and a low mist clinging to the river, and the flares drifted down brightly only to mute and blue as they finally fizzled out in the mist.
Ten minutes after the flares came the high explosives. The Luftwaffe had orders to concentrate on the docklands to the east of the Tower of London, and the wharves about Southwark and Rotherhithe; while the docks had been targeted on many occasions previously, the Luftwaffe kept coming back again and again, determined to completely destroy the vital ports of London. Within an hour the docklands were ablaze, and great sheets of flame roared into the night sky in Rotherhithe as the Metropolitan Gas Works exploded.
Most people who were not part of the emergency response teams spent that night deep within shelters, praying that something would be left for them when they emerged in the morning. But there were nine people who preferred to spend the night within the thick of the raid, surrounded by clinging mist and ash and falling sooty debris.
Ariadne, Silvius, Stella, the Lord of the Faerie, Noah, Weyland, Malcolm, Jack and Grace stood on the southern river bank just opposite St Magnus the Martyr which rose on the northern side. All were dressed, not as modern men and women, but in the robes of when they had first lived: Jack and Grace wore the attire of a Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth—a white linen hipwrap for Jack and a skirt of similar material for Grace. Jack’s golden kingship bands glinted and Grace’s diamond bracelets danced in the flickering lights of the fires.
Almost four thousand years ago, tens of thousands had witnessed the Dance of the Torches which had opened the Troy Game. This night there would be only seven witnesses to watch the Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth open a new Game.
There were no lines of lithe, beautiful dancers. There were no torches or ribbons or singing. There was no ambition or fear or hatred.
There was merely death falling from the sky, horror creeping along the river and bankside streets, and the small group of participants who had, between them, made such a nightmare of the original intent to build a Game to benefit Troia Nova.
They waited until almost one in the morning, when the fires had built—and merged—to such an extent that the continually exploding bombs made no visible flash impression within the conflagrations. The mist over the Thames had almost dissipated, but enough remained that the river was shrouded in an eerie yellow and orange haze.
Jack looked at Grace, shared a silent thought with her, then turned to Noah.
“Eaving,” he said, using her goddess name, “I need your permission to—”
“Do whatever you need,” said Noah. “Use whatever you wish. You do not have to ask my permission.”
Jack nodded, then turned to the river. He took a step forward so that he was only some three or four feet from the water’s edge, and very slowly raised one arm so that it extended out before him at shoulder height, his fingers reaching out over the water.
About his shoulders, his marks began to writhe.
For long minutes nothing happened, then, very slowly, lights rose up from the riverbed.
Tens of thousands of lights.
Water sprites, rising from the depths of the river, the lights of the firestorms reflecting in their coppercoloured eyes.
His arm still extended, Jack turned his head very slowly towards Grace.
She took a deep breath, then stepped forward to his side. She lifted a hand, running it slowly over his shoulders, allowing her fingers to entwine with his marks, and ran her hand lightly down his outstretched arm until it lay over his hand.
The lights just under the water’s surface moved in what at first appeared to be an aimless and chaotic manner, but which within minutes resolved into a complex dance. When they’d finished, when the sprites had stilled, their eyes cast upwards to reflect the light, they had formed a gigantic unicursal labyrinth just under the rippling surface of the water. The labyrinth was vast, extending from bank to bank and from the Tower of London down the river to Blackfriars Bridge.
Combined with the smoke and haze and mist, and the leaping light of the fires, the underwater labyrinth of light shone with an ethereal luminosity that was, even within the destruction of the air raid, one of the most beautiful things any of the watchers had ever seen.
“Grace?” Jack said very softly, and she smiled at him, and nodded.
She lifted her hand from his—Jack lowering his arm as she did so—and stepped a pace away from him.
“Behold,” she said, softly but with such clarity that all heard her, “the Kingman stands before the labyrinth, here, on this night wrapped all about with mystery and magic.”
As she spoke, both Jack and Grace twisted down from the sky the powerful harmonies of the air raid—the pain and the fear and the destruction, and the jubilation of the Luftwaffe pilots, the roaring power of the fires—until it suffused their very beings, and throbbed through their bodies with every beat of their hearts.
We don’t allow it to corrupt us, Jack. We only use it.
He gave a nod, and she continued.
“Here, this night, in this ancient and beloved land, he will raise up a great mystery which will, in turn, lift from the land that which has corrupted it so that the land, and all who depend on her and live on her, may live better lives because of it.” Grace’s voice strengthened. “Here, tonight, we shall witness the rebirth of hope, and light, and watch as our Kingman consecrates the talisman which shall raise us from the tarnish that besets us!”
Grace raised up her arms as she spoke that last, and the light from the water sprites’ eyes pulsed forth once, twice, then a third time.
She lowered her arms, and her head besides, and seemed almost to fade into the mist. Her task now was simply to keep watch, and to maintain, with Jack, the power they were spiralling down from the air raid.
Now Jack stepped forward. As he had, so many thousands of years ago when he had been Brutus, he danced into the labyrinth, but this time he danced atop the water, his feet resting on the hands of the water sprites held just under the surface, rather than over the stone paths of the labyrinth he had constructed for the Troy Game.