the late nineteenth century and the turgid practices of the Golden Dawn, but its roots are older. And, more important, it works.
Whether it would work now remained to be seen; I sought to summon a star. I finished up the ritual and turned my attention to the conjuration triangle. A handful of frankincense, myrrh, and sage went into the little brazier inside the circle; it hit the hot charcoal and hissed up.
I held out my hands. “Lady Spica! I invite you …”
At first I didn’t think anything was happening, and I wasn’t surprised; I didn’t even know if you could summon a star like a normal spirit. But gradually the smoke began to congeal. The air cleared. Spica stood before me, but not in the conjuration triangle. She glanced at it and smiled an ambiguous smile. She stepped over the edge of the circle, lifting the hem of her gown, and I took a step back. She was loose in the room and unbound; I’d seen no evidence that she meant me harm, but I was still taking a chance.
Her lips moved in silence. “I can’t hear you,” I said. Spica smiled again, held out a hand. Then she turned her hand over and up, palm outward.
Stop. Wait.
It took me a moment. She held a finger to her lips and pointed to the clock.
“Seven in the morning? No. You’ll tell me when?”
A nod. She spoke once more, earnestly and long, but her words weren’t audible to me. Her tendrils of hair drifted out in a rising wind, and she was gone again.
I don’t like the feeling that I’m not in control. But in magic, it happens all the time. You’re only a piece of something, a tiny cog. You may never know the full story, and the powers who engineer such things operate on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes not even that. If fifty years of this have taught me anything, they’ve taught me patience.
Which is its own reward, so they say.
After the ritual, I cooled my heels for a couple of days. I saw nothing strange; nothing strange spoke to me. I looked for the comet, but to my frustration the temperature rose, with cloudy night skies. Stella was furious. However, Saturday, the night of the wassail, dawned cold and the frost remained in the lee of the hedges and in the pockets of the fields all day, until the sun went down in a fiery blaze. Alys and the girls had cooked all day, and I did the washing up and made some bread; by the time we’d finished, cars were starting to pull into the yard as the first of our guests arrived.
Cider and mead first, then wassail. You make toast and place it in the tree—it’s for the spirits, the good ones. I gather Serena rather fancied the shotgun, but it was left firmly in the hands of a neighboring farmer who could be relied upon to aim in the right direction and not take out one of the guests or a cow. We trooped out into the gathering twilight, clutching mugs and glasses, boots crunching on the icy grass. Carols were sung; the shotgun was fired. I looked up, but it was not dark enough yet to see the comet.
As the gunshot echoes were reverberating through the orchard to the sound of cheers, I turned to see Spica standing behind me, her finger to her lips. The cheers slowed and died, as though someone had pressed a mute button. I looked over my shoulder. My family, our friends, were still there, still moving and clapping, but in slow motion, and they were shadowy, like ghosts. Only the trees of the orchard were solid, and they looked taller, harder, older: stiff as stone. Spica said, “Come.”
Her voice was musical and low, and I realized how inhuman she was. Her eyes were whiteless, a burning green. She held out a sharp-nailed hand, bonier than before, the fingers longer.
We were entering her world now, I thought. I stepped forward and took her cold hand. Turning, she led me through the stately trees and out into the fields. The frost sparkled into snow, thick drifts of it against the ancient hedge patterns, but I was warm in the aura of Spica the star.
“My sisters are waiting. He needs to wake,” she said. Her voice was musical but cold: the sort of voice you might expect from a star.
“ ‘He’ is the—the person I saw? The comet?”
“Ah, you saw him?” She seemed anxious. “So his shadow is here already? Then there is great danger.”
I wanted to ask, What sort of danger? but pride stopped me. “His shadow?”
“Yes. We will see him soon.” She lifted the hem of her gown to step over a tuft of reeds. The ground here was marshy, patterned with thin ice. “Do not worry. We are almost at the causeway.”
I did not know what she meant by this; there was nothing akin to a causeway in my version of the world. But then, we weren’t in my world now … And as we traversed the field, I saw a glimmer of stone through a gap in the hedge: a long road, heading into the distance, rimmed with silver fire and leading to a tower. It resembled a Norman keep: round and squat as an owl in the landscape.
“Is this where your sisters—live?”
“It is what we create when we need to.” She set foot on the causeway, pulled me along. Our footsteps rang out like hammer beats. The causeway wasn’t stone, as I’d thought, but metal, like solid moonlight. As we drew closer, I saw that the tower was made of the same substance.
“You work with light?” I asked.
“We are stars.” She smelled of sage and snow.
The portcullis was up; the tower shivered faintly. We went through into a central courtyard and here, indeed, were the sisters of Spica: the spirits of the Behenian stars. They stood in a half circle, the Pleiades clustered together in a whispering huddle, silver-dressed; Aldebaran holding a thistle, her hair blood-dropped with rubies; Capella laughing, sapphire bedecked against azure silk. Like their spokessister Spica, all were attenuated, passing for human, something else beneath the masks of women. For the first time in years I was too shy to speak. Schoolboyish, I stood before the weight of their gaze.
One of the Behenian stars stepped forward. This one was gold and blue, holding a sprig of juniper. Frantically remembering Agrippa’s correspondences, I placed her as Sirius. Her star hung overhead, following on the Hunter’s heels. The stars of her sisters wheeled about her, but there was a newcomer in the sky, hanging over the bleak edge of the distant hills, which were higher than they should have been.
The comet was coming. Akiyama-Maki blazed over Arcturus and the star herself was coming forward, her red-and-green gown flecked with jasper beads. The comet was a bright silvery-gold, like a bead in the sky. It would be visible in the Earthly heavens now.
We have to bring him in.
“By ‘he,’ you mean the comet?”
We have to see him safely through.
“If we don’t—what will happen?”
“He is close,” Spica said. “But he has not yet woken.”
It was at this point that my colleague Dr. Roberts’s voice suddenly flashed into my mind, saying, Really very close. “His path should take him past the Earth, though,” I said. He has not yet woken: that was literally true. As the comet, that dirty snowball hurtling through space, came closer to the sun, the warmth of the sun would begin to release its gases, causing the tail to appear.
“He’s been traveling for a long time,” Spica said. “He sleeps and he dreams.”
“What dreams does a comet have?”
“Protection. The cold of deep space, of death. His cold self dreams but does not wake.”
“And when he dreams, he’s dangerous? Because he’s—what?” I didn’t see comets as innately malevolent. “Trying to protect himself in sleep?”
“Yes. And if he does not wake quickly enough, he might leave his path, come too close to the world. He needs a pilot,” the star said. “You will be his pilot.”
“I’ve never—” I stopped. Because I’d been there already, onto the snowball surface of Akiyama-Maki.