“Is the moon full?” I asked.
“That’s a full moon, all right.” He sounded satisfied. “And there’s the labyrinth.”
We walked towards it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.
The plants that outlined the maze were low to the ground, though. None of them was more than a foot tall. I bent down, picked a needlelike leaf, black in the moonlight, and crushed it between finger and thumb. I inhaled, and thought of raw lamb, carefully dismembered and prepared, and placed in an oven on a bed of branches and needles that smelled just like this.
“I thought you people burned all this to the ground,” I said.
“We did. They aren’t hedges, not any longer. But things grow again, in their season. There’s no killing some things. Rosemary’s tough.”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“You’re standing in it,” he said. He was an old man, who walked with a stick and talked to strangers. Nobody would ever miss him.
“So what happened up here when the moon was full?”
“Locals didn’t walk the labyrinth then. That was the one night that paid for all.”
I took a step into the maze. There was nothing difficult about it, not with the bushes that marked it no higher than my shins, no higher than a kitchen garden. If I got lost, I could simply step over the bushes, walk back out. But for now I followed the path into the labyrinth. It was easy to make out in the light of the full moon. I could hear my guide, as he continued to talk.
“Some folk thought even that price was too high. That was why we came up here, why we burned the lunar labyrinth. We came up that hill when the moon was dark, and we carried burning torches, like in the old black-and-white movies. We all did. Even me. But you can’t kill everything. It don’t work like that.”
“Why rosemary?” I asked.
“Rosemary’s for remembering,” he told me.
The butter-yellow moon was rising faster than I imagined or expected. Now it was a pale ghost-face in the sky, calm and compassionate, and its color was white, bone-white.
The man said, “There’s always a chance that you could get out safely. Even on the night of the full moon. First you have to get to the center of the labyrinth. There’s a fountain there. You’ll see. You can’t mistake it. Then you have to make it back from the center. No missteps, no dead ends, no mistakes on the way in or on the way out. It’s probably easier now than it was when the bushes were high. It’s a chance. Otherwise, the labyrinth gets to cure you of all that ails you. Of course, you’ll have to run.”
I looked back. I could not see my guide. Not any longer. There was something in front of me, beyond the bush-path pattern, a black shadow padding silently along the perimeter of the square. It was the size of a large dog, but it did not move like a dog.
It threw back its head and howled to the moon with amusement and with merriment. The huge flat table at the top of the hill echoed with joyous howls, and, my left knee aching from the long hill-climb, I stumbled forward.
The maze had a pattern; I could trace it. Above me the moon shone, bright as day. She had always accepted my gifts in the past. She would not play me false at the end.
“Run,” said a voice that was almost a growl.
I ran like a lamb to his laughter.
Down to a Sunless Sea
2013
THE THAMES IS a filthy beast: it winds through London like a blindworm, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.
It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.
Nobody drinks it, neither the rainwater nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies, then come up again, spout the river water, shiver and hold up their coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.
The woman does not appear to care about the rain.
She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships, as they bob at anchor. She must do something, to keep body and soul from dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.
You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first, for she is statue-still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far
