XII

EARTH, WIND AND IRE

Compared to Anne Boleyn, earthworms live rather ordinary lives.

Day after day spent mooching and mulching through soil, their big moment comes when they poke their head into the sunshine and become a blackbird’s breakfast. Except that tonight one London worm community was having an altogether livelier time than usual.

This community of worms lived in Regent’s Park, tucked in a bed of yellow Californian roses, and up until a few minutes ago their lives had been simple and, well, wormy. But now, as Big Ben struck twelve, their soil began to quiver strangely. And thrum. With a good deal of shaking and groaning thrown in. Clay clods wobbled up, roots flapped, gravel rained down, crushing the wormholes and twirling the worms to make them look like marshmallow twists, but brown grey instead of pink and yellow.

Squirming to escape and stampeded by beetles and spiders scuttling past in a tussle of legs, the worms wriggled for the surface, trying to escape the earthquake, unaware that there was no earthquake. Simply a sorceress, chanting and stamping in the flower bed.

Draped in a moss-green velvet robe with Hex wrapped around her neck like a lively silvery scarf, Medea twirled in the rose trees, her fists above her head, flattening the earth over what she’d planted.

Dragons’ teeth.

Remember how the ones planted on Kolkis had sprung up into Skeleton Soldiers? The ones she’d planted tonight were even meaner – a monster medley, if you like.

Since landing at Heathrow, Medea had worked fast, racing to her London home, a swanky three-storey mansion in Belgravia, snatching her favourite magic ingredients from the cellar and click-click-clacking across the park in her high heels to this particularly private spot. Sorceresses, you see, move faster at night, like spiders. This is because there are fewer people around to ask them why they are dancing in the flower beds, damaging the flowers and wearing a venomous snake around their necks, which, whatever you might have heard about Londoners, is still considered unusual behaviour.

Breathing in the spicy scent of the roses, she tried to block out the memory of the stench in the cellar. And the squealing. We’ll come to what she kept down there later on, but for now, let’s just say it wasn’t the usual old suitcases and a broken vacuum cleaner you’d expect.

Hex coiled round and looked into her eyes. “Can we go home now?” he hissed, thinking of how flying had rather dried his scales and he’d just love a wriggly dip in the swimming pool in Medea’s garden.

“Of course not, scale-brain!”

Medea’s eyes glittered like broken glass as, kneeling down, she squelched soil between her fingers, scooped up two fistfuls and held them to the sky.

Hecate! Queen of evil, Queen of night,

Helper of witches, hear me!

Fanning out her long fingers over her head, the soil drizzled down, showering over her shoulders and bouncing off Hex’s head.

Be our darkest help at hand,

Raise our helpers from this land!

Three thumps rang out of the earth into the stillness and Medea stood up, her face a cold mask of pleasure. Turning, she stamped her feet into the earth, pounding a tattoo against the soil, facing the sky.

It was a good job that the park keeper wasn’t around to see her, because I can tell you he wouldn’t have taken kindly to that sort of behaviour in his most exotic roses. Nor would he have liked the crash of thunder and sudden wind that whipped across the park, twisting the rose bushes on their stalks and sending every rose petal into the air as she began to spin. Her skirt snagged in the thorns as she turned, muttering darkly under her breath, her face tilted to the moon, when suddenly she stopped and threw her arms up, twisting her hands, one over the other, as though winding in an invisible rope. Magic, as you might not know, needs energy and is much more like an aerobics class than any tapsy-wapsying of wands. Dark and primitive, it needs power and without lots of arm waving and leaping about, it’s just so many dark words lost on the air.

A whooshing sound erupted from the soil and Medea froze, staring down, her eyes wide and gleaming like broken glass, as three holes zigzagged open around her feet. Earth poured into them like muddy waterfalls and anyone close enough would have seen the soil crumbling onto the heads and shoulders of three curiously misshapen figures below.

Kneeling at the edge of the nearest hole, Medea peered down, whispering:

Hecate! Hear your servant’s plea,

Help the witch of Greece,

Lead me now with helpers three,

To Aries of the fleece.

Surprised?

I expect you were rather taken aback at how excited Medea was by the television footage at the café too?

I mean you just don’t expect a sorceress to leap on a plane, dive into some London rose bushes at midnight and ask for help in tracking down a ram, do you? And much as I’d like to reassure you that it was just for old time’s sake, I’m afraid you’re right to be worried.

“Can I have a look?” hissed Hex, his fangs glinting silver in the moonlight.

Medea glared at him.

“I need to know what’sss going on, don’t I?” the snake persisted, lowering himself towards the soil, squinting. “After all, you want a capable familiar, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Medea coldly. “In fact, I’m thinking of getting one. You know, a black panther, maybe, or a Bolivian bird-eating spider.”

She gripped Hex’s throat and clicked her fingers above his head. A scatter of black stars rained down over his skin, dusting his scales and jerking him as rigid as a broomstick. He gulped, flicking his green eyes to look at her just as she tossed him up into the air, caught him and jammed him, snout first, down into the earth.

“Capable, indeed,” she muttered, dusting the soil off her hands.

Then she paused, listening to the new sounds mingling beneath her feet: the throb of three hearts, an unfurling of knifelike feathers, a scrabbling of fingers, a throaty braying laugh.