Opening extract
Chapter One
As the hawk flew, his muscles aching with the almost forgotten exercise, his feathers dim in the approaching darkness, his instincts faltered and his vision blurred.
Below him the house, square in the gathering night, became overlaid with how this place had looked when his forefather had been brought from the far north in a reed cage, his pinions bound with leather straps. There had been no house then, no ring of trees, just an encampment of hide and wicker, the woman and a single sacred stone; the stone through which the river of power flowed.
There was rawness then, the air clear. Smoke was bitter, blood pungent on curled tongue, instincts clean; his will to kill absolute, an edge that cut. There was no doubt and no hesitation. The stone clear in its demands, the woman certain in her servitude, confident in receiving her reward.
The land over which he had been carried, talons tight round the woman's wrist, had spread; the horses become more magnificent. He had flown and hunted and killed in forest and moorland and mountain.
He had watched the tribe become civilised, their wealth lying in banks rather than in gold buried in the ground, their conflicts fought with words in panelled halls rather than with swords on blood-soaked turf. He had watched their muscles become weak, their savagery diminish, the woman's desire become heavy, its edge dulled, its objective fogged.
That evening as he rose into the darkness, carried on an updraft, he saw, as if in the present, fire-ravaged flesh puckering and seething. He saw potatoes turning black with slime, saw children starving in ditches, mouths green from eating grass, saw their parents hung for stealing food. He saw heads mounted on pikes staring sightless over wide grey waters.
He knew that the stone still craved blood. It held the woman and the tribe in its thrall. It held them in a grip so tight they lost sight of anything beyond its demands. It held them beyond death.
He had seen his world reduced to an abandoned ballroom where his droppings crusted the ormolu clocks, where he no longer hunted but was fed flaccid corpses, where his wings were never flexed to the full. But tonight, powered by her final desperation, he had been carried out into the evening air and flung upwards.
He saw a movement. He saw life in the long grass, and plummeted to the ground: talons open, beak poised.
Penny watched the bright red petrol tanker slide across the tarmac towards her.
She saw the black, shining tyres as high as the roof of her car. She saw with excruciating clarity the indentations on each tyre, the treads cut into the rubber, each channel inexplicably clear.
She saw the letters T E X A C O. A message to her. A message that she must interpret. She saw the radiator grille, a black mouth, and the white face of the driver, his hands racing desperately and pointlessly round his steering wheel.
It penetrated the windscreen, dragged her little car from its place of rest and, moving away, pulled out its entire offside and her mother.
Extract ends