Any human power, p.1
Any Human Power, page 1
Also by Manda Scott
Kellen Stewart
Hen’s Teeth
Night Mares
Stronger Than Death
Boudica
Dreaming the Eagle
Dreaming the Bull
Dreaming the Hound
Dreaming the Serpent Spear
Rome
The Emperor’s Spy
The Coming of the King
The Eagle of the Twelfth
The Art of War
Inès Picaut
Into The Fire
A Treachery of Spies
Stand-alone novels
No Good Deed
The Crystal Skull
Non-fiction
2012: Everything You Need to Know about the Apocalypse
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First published in 2024 by September Publishing
Copyright © Manda Scott 2024
The right of Manda Scott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com
ISBN 9781914613562
Ebook ISBN 9781914613579
September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org
Contents
Book One: THE PROMISE
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Interlogue 1
Book Two: THE POST
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Interlogue 2
Interlogue 2.1
Interlogue 2.2
Interlogue 2.3
Book Three: THE POSSIBLE PATH
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
Author’s note
Acknowledgements
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable – but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Speech to the National Book Awards, 2014
This book is dedicated to generations who lived before us and to those yet unborn, that the wisdom of both may inform the present.
Book One
—THE PROMISE—
Just because you die, doesn’t mean you get to be wise.
– Chris Luttichau
Prologue
February 2008
A grey midweek afternoon; raining, warm for the time of year.
The crow stoops straight out of the sun, spears into cloud and is lost for a while. It emerges into the kind of dreich drizzle that makes an umbrella seem like overkill, but still keeps the wipers moving intermittently on a stream of ambulances lining up outside the hospital below.
The hospital is the crow’s target, specifically, a single occupancy room on the third floor with a west-facing window outside which stands an ash tree, skeletoned by winter and sagging under a week’s weight of rain.
A final sweep brings the crow to rest in the tree’s crown. From here it skip-hops down to a long branch that has grown parallel to the window ledge, close enough to see in to the solitary bed. The branch is a perfect diameter for a long sit: nine days and nine nights in winter weather. Nine, the number of Odin, and thrice three, the number of Bride, both of them deities of death, birth and battle.
Time is what we make of it, and this crow is the very embodiment of patience. Only slightly grumpy, it hunches its shoulders, sidles closer to the tree’s trunk and settles in to wait.
Presently, a new occupant is brought into the room and installed in the bed: Alanna Penhaligon, sixty-two years old, grey-haired, and not known, if we’re honest, for her patience.
Chapter One
Nine days later
‘Lan?’
Finn tapped lightly on my arm. His gaze sought mine, which was odd enough for me to meet it.
‘When you come home,’ he said, ‘can we—’
I thought I hadn’t moved, but one eyebrow must have risen a hair’s breadth because he bit off the rest of the sentence and his gaze skittered sideways to the ash beyond the window and the crow that waited there.
It was a patient crow. It had been waiting for days. I thought perhaps there was more than one and they were rotating in shifts, just as Finn was doing with his mother. He was very nearly fifteen by then, which was plenty old enough, apparently, for Maddie to leave him at my bedside, watching while I drifted off to a seashore, somewhere he’d never been …
It was a wild place, that shore, with rocks and fierce waves and—
Another tap, braver. ‘Can we go to sit on the hill at dusk and watch the crows going to bed?’
Clever boy. He’d lived with me long enough to know that if I were given a choice of what to do with any free evening, I’d climb up to the hillside above the farm and sit for an hour or so watching the crows settle in for the night.
So, on every level, that was a smart question, not least because it wasn’t remotely what he’d been going to ask before my blasted eyebrow twitched. He’d had his World of Warcraft face on, the slightly-not-here look that meant at least half of him was away killing Orcs in the digital landscapes of Azeroth.
I didn’t think anyone else recognised that look. It was our secret. Sixty-two-year-old grandmothers aren’t supposed to play World of Warcraft. Teenagers are, although their mothers have a tendency to impose curfews and restrictions and would be aghast if they knew the ease with which both were circumvented.
Finn’s mother in particular would have had screaming kittens if she’d known who was helping him do the circumventing, but he’d left home and moved in with Kate and me by then, working through the teenaged angst of a fatherless boy. We were in Suffolk and Maddie was in Scotland and he could have been dealing drugs or crashing motorbikes and she wouldn’t have been any the wiser. Warcraft seemed a pretty tame option, all things considered.
I didn’t introduce him to the game, I swear. It was just that when we needed a way to bond with the twelve-year-old who had called us out of the blue from Cambridge train station one evening late in October of 2005, it seemed useful to let him draw me deeper into his latest addiction.
He was brilliant and I was not, but as the years progressed, he stayed true to the partnership we built. We were never, therefore, in the top percentile, but good enough to join a solid ten-player team to fight in the player vs player battlegrounds and make the kinds of friendships that grow out of saving each other’s (digital) lives.
We joined a guild called ReadyCheck and helped them organise server tournaments once a month where the best teams could slug it out for rankings on a clunky website that Finn set up to collate all the scores. And that was us: both addicted, both having fun, and definitely bonded.
And now my co-conspirator had his tournament look on. He’d been desperate to play since an Orc Warlock had vaporised him near the end of last month’s final match. A month’s a long time though. Things had changed. Crows, for instance, had come to sit in the tree outside—
‘Lan?’ He was still looking straight at me. I thought, in fact, he’d fixed his focus on the place between my brows, so it could seem as if he were making eye contact without actually having to do it, but even this was pretty good.
And because he was trying, and because the crow was not going to be patient forever, and because today was … what it was, I nodded for water and when he supported my head with one hand and dribbled it off the spoon into my mouth with the other, I saved enough to let some words flow.
‘Finn, my love, I’m dying. There is no coming home from here. You know this.’
I’d been right about the between-the-brows thing because now his gaze snapped tight to mine and the feeling was quite different. His face had gone blank, a shield covering a shatteration of feeling. Except, of course, it didn’t cover anything.
‘Hey.’ I tapped his arm as he had tapped mine. ‘We’ve been talking about this for months. It’s fine. Dying happens to all of us. I just get to know when.’
Soon, obviously, but I didn’t need to belabour things. Not when I could see the c row in the fat shine of a tear when before I’d had to move my arm to get the drip bag to swing clockwise about five degrees and hope to catch the reflection on the backswing. Or wait for the particular nurse who understood these things. Nancy. She had a mirror that made crow magic. She was off shift by now, which was sad. I didn’t think there was time left to say good—
‘What happens, Lan? When you die?’ He was using words to draw me back to the room: always was a clever lad.
‘No idea.’
‘Lan, it’s your job.’
Well, yes. And, ironically – one could even say arrogantly and stupidly – I really had thought I was up to speed with all the possibilities of this. What I had lately discovered was the ocean of difference separating a lifetime’s academic exploration of existing and historical indigenous cultural beliefs concerning the metaphysics of death … and the actual lived (sorry) experience of it.
My thinking had become significantly more specific in the months since an oncology registrar who looked as if she’d had no sleep for weeks fixed her gaze on her notes and said I had multiple myeloma and while this wasn’t amenable to surgery I could have chemo if I wanted (I didn’t) but perhaps not to plan too far ahead. So, I’d had time to consider the implications with more personal interest than I’d ever done before, but there were still way more gaps than certainties.
I was fairly confident the shoreline that kept nudging into my awareness was the Between, the transition zone said to link the lands of life to the lands of death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead names this place as one of the six Bardos. Other cultures have other names, and we all have different landscapes. You might see it differently when your time comes: a forest leading into a meadow, maybe, or the boundary of a treeline high on a hill, a riverbank, a desert oasis: what matters is the edge-ness of this place, and that it calls to you.
I have always loved wild seas: there’s something captivating about the sharpness of fierce, salted air, the feel of it whisking your hair and the way the sun shines across the water, so bright, so straight, like a roadway to the skies.
Without exception, everyone I’d ever spoken to had said to go towards the light. The sun was the brightest thing I’d ever seen and I could feel its pull more strongly with every passing heartbeat.
Everyone had said, too, that the people gathered there would be the ones I’d trust most to guide me on the next phase of the journey. I was waiting for Kate, but so far I’d only heard Robbie.
It made a kind of sense. He’d been dead for decades when she’d only beaten me to the finish line by a handful of months, so (perhaps? One of the bigger unknowns) he’d had more time to get to know the landscape on the other side of the line and knew his way back to the borderlands.
Also, we’d known each other longer, which may have counted for something. Robbie was the first deep, true friend of my adult life, the first person I came out to, and he to me; the first one I could talk to about the things that mattered. We met over a Bunsen burner in the biochemistry lab and each recognised a kindred spark in the other, for all that he was a bishop’s son and I was a farmers’ daughter. We were both only children, which had its own stigma in those days, and the rest was too near the surface for it not to flash like a Belisha beacon.
We became each other’s shadows, talking, talking, talking, letting out all the words we’d held inside for what felt like forever. Everyone thought we were an item, so when some idiot drunk ran him over on Christmas Eve, the bishop invited me down to Taunton for the funeral early in the new year.
I took the train into what Robbie had always called Enemy Territory and I had always thought was an exaggeration. I was Scottish and young and while he had said often enough that the English upper classes considered overt displays of emotion to be on a par with public sex, I hadn’t understood – until I stood weeping among a host of black-garbed, stone-eyed Anglicans and felt their disdain burn acid on my soul.
Only his cousin was different: Connor, the Irish one, who was training to be a priest, but kept a low profile at the funeral because the Reformation wasn’t that long ago in their scale of things, and a man displaying Papist affinities ranked lower than a woman displaying emotion. He had riotous black hair, longer than mine, and wore a black linen jacket that almost hid his collar. I was amazed they’d let him come.
We found each other in the shadows where their scorn couldn’t reach, and so, at last, I had someone I could ask the question that burned inside. ‘Where is he now? What happens next?’
‘Oh, Lan …’ Connor cradled me close. He was bigger than Robbie, a grand, wild oak of a man with a soft Galway voice. He smelled of woodsmoke and hot iron and the sheer strength of him held me whole. ‘Do you want what my brethren would tell you? Or the bishop?’
I laughed snot onto his beautiful jacket. ‘Hardly.’
‘Good. Because if I know anything, it’s that both sides have lost all sense of the truth somewhere in these past two thousand years.’
‘Someone must know.’ Indignation felt sharp and hot and good.
‘I would like to think so. Just not anyone here.’ Holding me out at arm’s length, he thumbed the tears from my chin, then drew me in and planted a chaste kiss on the crown of my head. ‘Maybe you could find out, eh? Go find the people who have the knowing and then bring it back to those who have forgotten. That would be a grand and lovely service to the world. A good remembrance for Robbie.’
I explored the idea, searching all its hidden angles and found none I didn’t like. ‘I could prove the bishop wrong.’
‘You could publish whole papers proving him wrong.’ When Connor grinned, I could see his cousin in him, and something older, like a wild Irish hero, come down from the hills. ‘That would be bold.’
In the Ireland that suffered under the yoke of England, being ‘bold’ was seriously bad. When the Republic recovered itself, bold became exceptionally good.
I grinned back at him, feeling my face stretch with the strangeness of it. ‘It would, wouldn’t it?’
We skipped breakfast the next morning and shared a taxi to the train station. Connor headed west, for the ferry to Dún Laoghaire. I travelled straight back to Cambridge, where I ditched a medical degree for anthropology: the whole of my life’s trajectory redirected by the power of death, and a five-minute conversation with a man whose voice had melted my bones.
I had my one big question – what happens next? – and spent the best part of the next four decades asking it of people who might reasonably be expected to provide an answer. Among the clutter of cultural overlays, they all said more or less the same three things:
First: those whom we had loved in life and who had loved us in return (unrequited crushes didn’t count) would come to guide us from the lands of life to the lands of death;
Second: it mattered a great deal to make this crossing with full awareness of who and where we were. In their eyes, the Western habit of medicalising death was no saner than our habit of medicalising birth, and both were evidence of cultural insanity;
Third: it wasn’t a good idea to hang around in the Between. Bad things happened if the dead didn’t get on with being dead and instead hung around to tread on the toes of the living.
I did not plan to hang around: this, I will swear this on whatever you can find that we both hold sacred.
I planned to step consciously into death, and believed I knew how. I had, in fact, been practising every night for several decades on the instructions of my earliest teacher, a young Mongolian woman who had taught me that our dreams were a practice ground for being dead and anyone with sense would use the experience they offered to good effect.
Her name was Uuriintuya, which meant something like Shining Dawn, and I met her when I was a new postgrad, too young to know that real academics observed their subjects but didn’t (absolutely did not, under pain of excommunication from the ivory tower) practise the things they so meticulously recorded.
With the optimism of youth, I’d managed to pull in some grant money for six months in the Mongolian Steppe, and then on the second day, embodying the noun too literally, I stumbled getting out of the Land Rover and broke my ankle.
