The Long Shadow

THE LONG SHADOW

A man and a boy sat on the roof of a great grey mansion that frowned like a harsh master over the small terraced houses that surrounded it on every side. The air was sultry, a bitter unmoving summer sulk, hot and secret with the makings of a storm; a thick, low, grey wall of cloud hung closely above them; and the city stretched before them with its mass of lives, each little group withdrawn behind its veil of brick and glass.

"The angel of death has been abroad in the land" - said Alastor Moody to Harry Potter as they sat together, arms balanced on their knees, looking outwards to the great spread of Muggle and Wizard lives. "You can almost hear the beating of his wings."

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Ten miles away, as he spoke, the remains of a house were smouldering. Two exhausted crews of firefighters, after hours of struggle, had finally managed to douse a singularly intractable fire. And inside the charred walls, nine corpses, dead before the first spark had struck, lay waiting for discovery.

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"Is that a quotation?" asked Harry. "It sounds like one."

"It is," answered the craggy, scarred Auror.

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No more than three blocks away from Grimmauld Place, an aging wizarding couple sat together in their front room, in a house no different from that of the Muggles on either side. After five days, they still had not made up their minds how they would tell their children about what the husband had seen in the Ministry of Magic, together with Minister Fudge and hundreds of colleagues. The very name spelled fear. But they would have been horrified - and heartbroken - had they known that their eldest child, upstairs, was at the same time trying to work out how to get word to the Dark Lord and join his party.

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"A hundred and fifty years ago, when Albus and I were children, this country went to war against Russia, for no good reason and with irresponsible light-heartedness. The results, Potter... were terrible. Soldiers armed with nothing but courage, led and fed by titled incompetents who had purchased their military rank with money... were sent to die in a distant country, against a great fortress held by brave men fighting for their fatherland... Disease, cold, mad charges against impossible targets... all the worst that war could do to men, was done to them.

"One man, perhaps one alone, had opposed this foolish war from the beginning. And when the people of Britain finally began to realise the folly with which the war had been started and conducted, his words sank into their souls like stone. He did not curse or condemn; he mourned. And they could feel the stride of the angel of death across the land, as if they had seen him in the face."

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Two miles north from Grimmauld Place, along the road that leads to the City of London, stood the mansion of the Howletts; more modest, perhaps, than the ancient mansion of the Blacks, but on the other hand neither hidden nor hostile, not surrounded by the spells created by generations of paranoia. The Howletts were a pureblood family, but they had long found it convenient to live as Muggles, and made considerable amounts of money from the stock exchange. Other wizards looked down on them. They saw something inherently dishonest about using sorcerous powers to guess, let alone direct, changes in share values. Even if you were so fond of gold, the feeling went, you should find it by decent wizarding methods - treasure quests and the like.

The Howletts did not care. Years of distaste and barely hidden rejection had hardened them. They regarded the rest of wizardkind with a contempt equal to that they received; and their first reaction to the news of Lord Voldemort's rise, long ago, had been grim satisfaction. Their view of wizarding moralism, they felt, had been confirmed, more than confirmed. A frequent comment among Howlett brothers, brides, and cousins, had been: "They criticise us, and then they treat that thug Tom Riddle like some sort of god." The temptation to let the respectable wizarding world stew in its own juice was still strong among them, even after twenty years and more than one death.

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"And yet, Harry, the deep truth was then as it is now. War would have come whether they wanted it or not. They hid from its reality as we do; only in a different corner. We pretend that war can be wished away by having kind thoughts. They preferred to pretend that war itself was kind. Human kind cannot bear very much reality. And for that matter," he added after a second's silence, "they are not fond of those who say it to them."

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Dolores Umbridge was sitting in her own prettified, over-decorated parlour at home, making small talk with her guests. She looked remarkably unaffected by her time in St. Mungo's, of which her acquaintances had never heard any explanation; just the same as ever, many thought - while some of the more perceptive ones noticed a less aggressive, more understated presentation, a slight tendency to shrink into the background, not to project herself quite so much on the assembly. Tea and pretty little coloured and rather sticky-sweet biscuits went round at remarkable speed, and one or two of the guests (most did not bother about such things) realised that Dolores had ordered her house-elves to become invisible, so as not to afflict them with their presence. They found this very considerate of her.

There was no point at which anyone said "This meeting will come to order;" the conversation just drifted into well-worn channels. These were all women with an agenda, a definite outlook on things; and right now, the outlook was bleak. As Mathilda Wilkerson remarked to Lucy Trelawney (looking like an even scrawnier and more overdressed version of her sister), everybody had gone mad. Lucy gave a ladylike, expressive little snort. This touched her in her own family relationships, and she said so. "You cannot imagine the man's charm unless you have felt it. Spend a little time in his company, and you will find it easy to think that black is white."

"Are you talking about Sybill?" asked a notoriously tactless, fat widow with an incongruously girlish face.

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As the older man spoke - slowly, broodingly, with a kind of desolate grandeur - Harry felt a stirring in himself. Moody loomed over him, a shadowed human mountain. He looked up at that great, gaunt, scarred face, at the huge gnarled hands clenched into fists around his heavy runestaff, at the thick cloak falling in folds around his massive body, the colour of the grey sky above; and the thought flashed across his mind, This is a man.

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"Yes," said Lucy Trelawney simply. "Sybill has always been an idealist. She has lived her life according to the highest ideals. Then she takes a post with this mountebank, and suddenly peace is out of fashion." Her bitterness made her voice shrill. "I have seen it happen under my eyes: first she had 'doubts'. Then she started coming at me with all sorts of propaganda stories - murdered students, intrusions into the school - one was about the daughter of that damned man Arthur Weasley - and, you know, she'd get offended when I did not take them all at face value. In the end, I could not say anything to her any longer, she always thought I was taking her for a liar."

"Oh dear," said Umbridge in a sympathetic tone, "do you mean that you are no longer speaking with your own sister?"

"That I am," said Lucy.

"And that Dumbledore manipulated her?"

"That I am."

"The man is a classic cult leader," pitched in Rowena Nott. "He just gets people to love him, and then they take anything he says as truth, not because there is anything in it, but because they would feel disloyal to him if they did not. And now he's got Sybill, who I always thought was sound as a bell, believing all his stuff about the Dark Lord. I think you should consider having your sister deprogrammed." (Actually, Rowena had always thought Sybill Trelawney a brainless ditz, but memories are easily changed in a sympathetic social environment.)

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Moody pointed the tip of his runestaff against the ground and, balancing himself on it, rose slowly and heavily. As if in answer to his rising, the sullen humid air started to rise into a breeze; and he stood as if to look in the distance.

"There is nothing good about war, Potter," he said softly, "except that sometimes the alternative is worse. And it cannot be avoided It comes at its own leisure; and when it is coming, there is nothing that can be done to stop it." Around him, the wind was rising, and his and Harry's cloaks flapped and snapped in the air stream. "But we are mortals, and we cannot bear the thought; and so we lie to ourselves - in all sorts of ways. And we hate and fear the bearer of the news - we blame him for the news, as if he had caused the storm by forcing us to recognise it." His voice had fallen almost to a whisper, yet Harry could still hear each word, clearly, above the whistle and snap of the wind. And Moody raised his staff to the dark clouds; and a terrible flash and roar fell from the heavens, to the very foot of Grimmauld Place, and blinded and deafened them both for a moment.

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Carlie Mack's words fell heavily from him, unwilling and simmering with anger for being forced to acknowledge facts. He was no hero, not even a particularly good man. In his own family he was regarded without much affection as selfish and idle; but now nobody was thinking of contradicting him. As the lightning flashed around the house, his elderly father, his brother, his wife and their children mutely accepted the sentences that would shape their lives from then on.

"We can't hide from it any more. War has started, and we are right in its path. You, Jennie, will report to Dumbledore immediately, tell him where we are and what we are doing, and ask if there is anything he suggests we should do. Meanwhile the rest of us will start setting up a circle of proper protective spells around the house." His wand flashed white in his hand in the light of a sudden, close thunderbolt.

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Driven by the wind, the rain was gushing down in torrents, beating on the two human forms as they made their way across the roof to the attic. Sheltered under Moody's cloak, Harry felt the great machine of bone and muscle and sinew shifting and moving, alive and warm next to his own body. It was still a few days before he would experience that strange, grim mixture of physical pleasure and pain; but for the first time, as the gloom and storm beat around them, he knew what he felt, and what he wanted.