Page 31 of The Salt King

The moment they were in the open air, the cold smacked into him like a cargo train. The snow was thick on the ground now, creaking under every step, pristine. Where salt light hung in mist-bands, it tinted the white land its eerie purple-amber. Avelyn pulled his coat around him tighter, not to much avail. All his clothes were good for Italy, where it was never cold. He hadn’t had time to buy anything that would help against all this. He hadn’t thought to. The climate of southern England in December was brown and wet and miserable. He’d thought the days of snow and frozen rivers were as long lost as Queen Victoria. Still, Hreodwater thought English was newfangled. Of course it hadn’t bothered with climate change.

“The point is,” Fabian said, following him, “that priests are modern apostles, which means teacher, right? And the original apostles were all men, so we’re just trying to stick as closely to Christ’s own choices as we can.”

“You’ve forgotten about Mary Magdalene,” Avelyn said, scanning the shore. Yes: there was the ferry, and thank Christ, there were already people clustered around it, so the first sailing must be soon.

“No, no, she never preached, she never spread the Word—”

“Apostle of the Apostles. She saw the resurrection and told the others.”

“Yes, but that’s hardly teaching, and it’s only in John.”

“John’s the only one who quotes Christ himself saying he is the literal son of God too. In the rest only other people say it and according to Jesus himself, he’s just some bloke.”12

“That’s heresy,” Fabian said knowingly.

“Fabian, I mean this in the most brotherly possible way, but fuck off before I shove you in the fucking fen.”

As Avelyn crossed the green in front of the minehead, the way was busy. People were setting up stalls by the light of salt torches, hanging up garlands of holly and wreaths made of mistletoe and bright berries, and building a mammoth—life-sized—from willow twigs. There was a wolf and a bear too, all enormous.

Yes: the fire festival. God. Yule. He’d forgotten. It would be . . . when? Three days. But the festival would start tonight.

He knew something odd was happening when he reached the dock and the jetties, because it was crowded, and not in a patient way. The Outsiders, all tourists who had stayed overnight, were talking uneasily amongst themselves, and a few were trying to argue with someone towards the front. He overheard snatches of conversations about trying to find somewhere to stay overnight again, and how expensive it was, and whether there would be anyone who spoke English . . .

“What’s going on?” Avelyn asked a lady with a little boy when he couldn’t edge any further through.

“The woman who does the ferry says she can’t take anyone across today. Something about the snow.” Her eyes caught on his collar, and he saw her wonder if she should move her little boy well away from him. It gave him a familiar needle of shame-fury, the one that made him want to march up to the Pope and demand that any priest found to have done that wasn’t only dismissed, as if he’d just made some tone-deaf comment online, but hurled into a volcano. There were precedents. That was how the Japanese had dealt with particularly irksome priests for some time, and if you looked at it from a reoffending point of view, it was markedly effective.

“The snow?” he said instead. The snow was heavy, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the ferry. The Flood wasn’t frozen.

“Wait, are you Hreod?” she asked, looking at him more closely. “Can you speak Hreod?”

“Yes—”

“Can you—”

“Yes,” he said. “Redspear! Grandmother—what’s going on?”

People heard Hreod and let him by, and eyes followed him hopefully as he slipped through.

Redspear was standing on the dockside beside a sign that said in English, Mandarin, and Hreod that the ferry was suspended until tomorrow. “I’ve been telling them,” she said, unbothered by all the agitated people. “I can’t take them across in this snow. Too much now.”

“What’s wrong with snow?”

“Look,” she told him, pointing across the Flood. “This isn’t our snow.”

He had a terrible feeling he was coming up to an impassable glacier of Hreod Thinking. “Why do you say?”

“You’re the witch; you tell me what’s wrong over there.”

He looked into the dawn. Fenland sunrises were glorious, and he had never seen any like them anywhere else. This one was sprawling mauve and orange right across the eastern sky, enamel-bright in the stillness of the Flood, as though it wasn’t water which didn’t look like water now but a sheet of polished bronze. The snow was falling from the strangely shaped clouds, settling among the reeds, so undisturbed that even on individual leaves it was sitting an inch thick. The cold made everything feel razor-sharp, every frozen line of every spider’s web vivid, every fold of the lily pads, every feather on the swans sailing north. Further onto the fen, there was a fog bank, hiding the road to the Outside, tinted gold by the sun and violet by the wisps of salt light that hung in the air even that far from the mine. And in the fog . . .

In the fog, there were lights. High up, like there was a tall building out there; except there wasn’t. The closest lights should have been the halogens at the railway station, but that was three miles away. They should have been bright dots toward the horizon.

“Oh,” Avelyn breathed.

He had seen it once before, when he was small. He had convinced himself, looking over the memory as an adult, that it had just been a shape in the fog, but—it wasn’t.

It was a castle. It had not been there yesterday.