فصل چهل و یکم

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

As the Crow Flies

The Raven lofted up and over a sheer glass massif, heading northwest through the rain. Below him was a jumble of buildings thrown together with little rhyme or reason beyond the accident of history and the ravages of time, fire, and aerial bombing. Pitched roofs and piercing spires pointed to heights that had been unimaginable at the time they were built, but were themselves now looked down on by soaring office towers and mammoth blocks of flats alongside them.

The Raven caught an updraft from a building’s heating system venting into the rain, and spiraled higher. As he did so he looked back on the cityscape behind him, where there were fewer towers and more blocks, all bisected by the sinuous river curving between them, tamed by the embankments built on both sides.

The Raven remembered the living river, remembered how its curves had sharpened and shallowed over the time it had known it, a snake moving over the land at a pace too slow for men to notice. And now it was banked in stone and concrete, tamed into a runnel, not a living river at all. He remembered when it had driven mill wheels. Now the only wheel was a massive upended bicycle wheel on the South Bank, where people paid to see what the Raven saw and had seen for generations.

The Raven flapped back on course, the scrap of George’s T-shirt fluttering in its beak. Ahead of it, in the distance, it saw the densest cluster of modern high-rises, lit up from within against the gunmetal rain clouds behind them. He centered himself on the bulbous outline of the one that looked like a giant’s cucumber thrust rudely end-first into the ground, and started to descend.

In a direct line between him and the cucumber, about half a mile in front of it, was the eastern edge of a massive complex of concrete and glass, like a fortress assembled from ziggurats and thin spiky towers. Inside the boundaries of this futuristic urban citadel there were fountains and walkways on different levels, and there was more concrete. The Raven knew that below the surface of the southern end of this sprawl had once run the ancient city wall. And he could remember when the dwarfed white church marooned within a startling patch of green in the cement bastion had once been the tallest building in the area.

It swerved around one of the spiky tower blocks and dropped suddenly into a forgotten corner of the complex. There were some raised flower beds being lashed by the rain. They were not full of flowers as such, but had been planted with hardy city-proof vegetation that almost matched the cement walkways for lack of color and decoration. The only piece of exuberance was a small grove of horse tail reeds.

The Raven dropped to the earth in front of the reeds and looked up at the feathery tips being buffeted by the wind and the rain squall breaking overhead.

Above it crouched a powerful figure, black and shiny in the rain, the wetness coursing over its hunched and massive body reflecting the surrounding streetlights. It was an unmistakeably male figure; below the waist, a man with strong overmuscled legs bent ready to spring out of the rushes at any unwary passer-by. But his principal feature was in the predominance of muscle and bulk curving up from the waist; not the muscle of a man, but the raw brutal power and bulk of a full-grown bull. The shoulders hunched massively below a bull’s head topped by aggressively pointing horns; and so well had the sculptor shaped it, that the sound of enraged snorting seemed to lurk about it, even though it never—to the normal eye—moved or breathed at all.

The Raven hopped up on its shoulder. It dropped the piece of T-shirt into the flower bed in front of it as it sidled up to a pricked bovine ear and clacked its beak.

Above them, the spike of apartment block failed to keep the rain cloud pinned in place, and the rain moved on to drench other parts of the city. As the rain eased, and a small patch of fugitive blue appeared in the cloud-scape, the Raven could again be seen flapping south.

In the flower bed, beneath the rushes, for those whose eyes saw what was there and what really was not there, there was no Minotaur. Just a patch of newly turned earth, where a hoof had plashed the ground in anger and set off.