The gateway had creaked. Above, blocking the sky, the caer loomed, and she saw it was wooden, a great timber edifice that turned so slowly she could barely see its edge move against the coming night. She turned back to run.
And didn’t move.
The trees were nearer.
A living barricade, they had closed off the end of the drawbridge, elder and ash and elm, a vanguard of branches. In their green dimness a flock of birds erupted, scattering in fright. One tendril of ivy encroached stealthily onto the wooden bridge.
She had to go! Right now, at once, or she’d be trapped.
But she couldn’t.
Furious, she threw down the bag of clothes and turned to the caer. He was up there, on his own, locked in, unarmed, and she had done that to him. If these enemies of his wanted to kill him he wouldn’t stand a chance. She hated him, yes, she despised him, but she didn’t want him dead. It was all totally infuriating.
The tendril of ivy wrapped itself around her foot; she stamped on it, and it stayed still. Then she made up her mind.
The only person in the room was a young man.
He was lolling in a chair, one leg over the carved armrest, and he was wearing a mask. Through its slits his eyes watched, challenging and bright. He neither stood nor spoke.
Rob stared in surprise; then stepped in and glanced around the room. A broken mirror, a candle that had rolled out of its holder. Nothing else.
“Where is she?”
He heard Vetch come in behind him; in the dark chamber the candlelight dazzled. Behind the mask the King’s eyes narrowed against it. “Who?”
“Chloe! What have you done with her?” Rob grabbed him and hauled him upright. They were the same height.
The King’s voice was scornful through the green leaves of the mask. “Maybe I should ask the same of you.”
It was a whisper, raw, oddly familiar.
Rob frowned. “Do I know you?”
The King laughed and sat back down. “Chloe knows me.”
Angry, Rob said, “Is that why you wear a mask, in case she’ll recognize you? If you’ve hurt her, if you’ve touched her…”
“What will you do?” the voice asked, amused. “Come riding to her rescue? The knight and the sorcerer. How heroic! But Chloe won’t like it. Chloe, I’ve found, always likes to do things herself. And she won’t want you, of all people.”
“Why not me?”
The King was grinning. His voice went low, full of mock horror. “Because she despises you, Rob.”
Rob went cold. “Liar!”
Vetch’s hand gripped his shoulder, hard. “Did she lock you in here?” he said to the masked face.
The King laughed, a mocking sound. “She wouldn’t do that, Poet. She and I are friends. I advise you to take her brother back through your Darkhenge and leave us alone, because the truth is Chloe is getting to like the Unworld. Maybe she won’t even want to go home.”
Chloe was halfway up the stairs when the whisper came from behind her. “I thought it was you who was supposed to be locked up.”
She swiveled.
A pretty woman with green swirls on her face stood leaning against the wall. She had blond hair and small pieces of jet and malachite had been threaded through it; they glinted. Chloe liked them. Then she snapped, “Who are you?”
“Now that I admire. Haughty and irritable. You can call me Clare. We’re here to rescue you.”
Chloe scowled. “I’m perfectly capable of doing things by myself.”
“I’m quite sure you are.” Clare looked at her thoughtfully, then glanced up. Voices murmured in the darkness. “They’ve opened the door,” she said quietly.
“Will they hurt him?”
“I don’t think so. Do you want to know who they are?”
“His enemies. He said.” Chloe chewed her lip and looked at the woman and said, “I don’t suppose … we could come to some agreement. Just you and me?”
There was silence. Then, slowly, in the darkness, the woman smiled.
Vetch said, “You know who I am, Winter King?”
“I know. You’re Taliesin, the star-browed, the Cauldron-born. Your songs are dangerous to me, but—”
A gasp from the hall below stopped him. Vetch turned. “Goddess?”
There was no answer; he flicked a glance at Rob, thrust the candlestick into his hand. “Stay here.”
As soon as he had gone, the King sat up and leaned forward, hands together between his knees. “Did you really think I was keeping her here?” he said earnestly. “You know how headstrong she is.”
“You kidnapped her. But she’s escaped, hasn’t she?”
Behind the mask the King’s eyes darkened. Then he reached up and peeled off the mask of green leaves, and Rob’s breath choked with fear, until he saw that under the mask was another, of thin birch bark. “How can you escape from yourself ?” the dark slit of the mouth whispered.
It blew. The candle flames went out.
Instantly Rob felt a crashing shove in his back. He sprawled forward, saw for a second the flicker of delight in the King’s eyes, the candles tumbling and rolling. He tried to gasp, but had no breath; over his head a voice snapped impatiently, “Come on!”
The King gave a great laugh. He leaped past Rob like a dark shadow, grabbed a hand, and was gone.
Rob rolled and staggered up, lurching out into the corridor. “Vetch!” he yelled.
He ran to the stairs, then hurtled down them, tripping headlong at the bottom over a dark heap that lay huddled there.
“Vetch?”
Groping, his fingers found a hand; it was cold. Frantically he searched for a pulse. It was faint and steady, but there was a dark smear too that came off on his fingers. He stared at it, then looked around fearfully.
“Clare?”
No answer. Had she done this? Was this her final revenge, taken at last?
No time to think. He had to get light. Suddenly the darkness of the castle terrified him; he wanted to drag Vetch out into the forest, but would that be right, would that kill him? And how can you die in the Unworld? Does it mean being born somewhere else? Was that why stories never ended? He laughed, a short, hysterical bark, bitten off.
Then he ran upstairs, groped till he had all the candles and thundered back down with them. He felt carefully over the poet’s body.
The crane-skin bag was jammed under Vetch’s weight. It creaked softly as Rob tugged it out, his fingers sliding inside. He felt something cool, and hard as glass. Something furry, that jerked away. An iciness that couldn’t be possible. Tiny cubes that dissolved as he touched them.
Finally, the tinderbox.
He sparked a flame on his third try, and lit the candles.
The flames wavered in the draft from the open gateway; they showed him the empty hall and Vetch. The poet lay awkwardly, one arm flung out, a gash on his head bleeding, but not badly. Now, as if light woke him, his eyelids flickered.
Rob looked around. They needed water.
Reluctantly, he went to the bag again, but hardly had he touched it when Vetch’s cool hand grasped his. “No,” the poet muttered thickly.
“It’s all right, I don’t think you’ve broken anything but there’s a cut on your head—”
“Help me to sit up.”
Propped against the bottom stair, Vetch looked haggard. He took a ragged handkerchief from his pocket and the water bottle from the bag, moistened the rag and wiped blood from his temple. He looked at the smear and his face was set.
“Who pushed you?” Rob said.
“I don’t know.”
“Clare?”
“I don’t know! I called her but there was no answer. Then a hand came out and shoved; I went straight down, slammed my head.” He turned painfully and looked up into the dark. “Chloe’s not here, then?”
Rob rubbed his hands over his face. He sat down and stared into the shadows. “She’s gone. So’s the King. Someone clouted me from behind too. Maybe Clare. Maybe someone else.”<
br />
Vetch was watching him intently. “Who was it, Rob?” he said quietly.
Rob shrugged. He wanted to scream, to stand up and switch on a light, to beg for electricity, for the sun to rise. The darkness was beginning to creep inside him, to put out all his old certainties, his beliefs.
“She shouted, ‘Come on,’ to him. She grabbed his hand.”
Vetch didn’t have to ask. But Rob said it anyway, just to make himself believe it, to hear the word. “Chloe. It was Chloe.”
He looked up, his face bleak. “He was telling the truth. He’s not keeping her prisoner. She’s with him. She doesn’t want to be rescued!”
A. ALIM: FIR
“You’ve got to stop them, Father,” she kept saying. “You’ve got to make sure they don’t switch anything off!” She was hysterical almost. And the rest of them, scraggy-looking girls, a few men who hadn’t washed for weeks, by the stink.
Vetch’s tribe.
“What’s it to do with you?” I asked. I was gruff. Katie still hadn’t come. Only John, white as a sheet, in there now holding Chloe’s hand across the bedding, talking, talking about anything.
The woman said, “He’s taken Rob into the Unworld with him. Our people are ringed around the henge. He’ll get her out. This is possible. It can be done. You must believe me.”
Rosa, her name is. She grabbed my hand.
I let her. I said calmly, “Nothing will be turned off until we know it’s too late.”
In my pocket, the rosary was twined around my fingers like ivy.
I know why the hill resounds.
THE BOOK OF TALIESIN
The ground was rising, but still marshy. Plumes of gas plopped from it and hung, shimmering with a pale green phosphorescence, stinking of rot. As Rob strode after Vetch, he knew that he was worn with exhaustion and worry, that they had scrambled for hours through stands of oak and rowan, only to reach this place where every growth seemed stunted and dwarfish, twisted in brackish mire.
Since they’d left the caer there had been no sign of Clare. Twice Vetch had turned and called out to her, “Goddess! Please!” But nothing had moved down the long aisles of the wood. Now, deep in mist, Vetch paused for breath. He gasped. “The stars.”
The sky seemed closer. The summer constellations hung unmoving, the Milky Way a glimmer. For a moment Rob had no idea what was different; then his heart gave a leap of fear.
Night. From far in the west, darkness was spreading, a real midnight blackness; in his mind, Rob mixed it on the palette. “I thought you said—”
“The Unworld changes. Someone is controlling this.” Vetch mused, arms folded. “Rob,” he said reluctantly, “why would she want to stay?”
Rob tugged one boot out of the mire. “She’s always been a bit … stubborn.” He thought of her suddenly, of the time they’d been messing around with the radio, each trying to snatch it, and it had got broken. Her blurted, hot rage. I always get the blame for everything.
And he had kept quiet, and let it happen.
Vetch was watching. Not wanting to talk, Rob marched on.
Birds were moving. For the first time since entering the Unworld, Rob became aware of its hidden life. A heron flew above the trees, its slow wing flap terrifying. A tiny lizard, black as velvet, streaked across the path.
They walked through a stand of beech, all brown and crisp leaved, into a place where there was grass, soft mossy grass, with tiny closed blue flowers, and bracken.
Trickling through it, shallow and almost silent, clogged with algae and winding water reed, was a small river.
Vetch stopped, waist high in the umbels of cow parsley.
Rob came past him, astonished.
He knew this place.
It was near Silbury Hill, on the banks of the Kennet. When he was small, they’d had picnics here, his mother and him, and Chloe, only a little girl. Jam sandwiches and chips and little cakes from the baker’s. Sticky orange juice, striped straws that tangled.
He stood and stared. Three bright yellow plastic plates lay on the grass. On one a silver paper wrapping was crinkled up into a ball. He knelt and picked it up. Next to it a dented Frisbee lay, near the nettle patch Chloe had stung her hand in.
“You recognize this?” Vetch said.
“Of course! It’s near Swallowhead Spring.” He shook his head. “But there wasn’t a forest anywhere near; just a cornfield on the other bank there, and some trees, a hedge—”
“Was Chloe with you?”
“Yes.” He was staring at the nettles. They were enormous. Vast spines sprouted from their stems, each with a gleaming pinprick of venom.
Vetch said, “Rob, think. How long ago?”
“About six years. She was … six, seven? She stung her hand....”
The poet crossed to the nettles and crouched by them, careful not to touch. “So I see,” he said, and at the same time a sound rang out, making them both jerk their heads up. A horn, blowing. Echoing and strange, it boomed over the river.
Vetch turned abruptly. “We’re moving through Chloe’s mind. Deeper and deeper, as we follow her through the circles of the caers. She remembers this place; that’s why it’s here. Her clearest memory is of the nettles, which is why they’re so enormous. It’s a child’s terror.”
“But it’s a real place.” Rob nodded toward the willows on the bank. “Just through there, and over the stream, is Silbury.”
Without a word, Vetch stood and pushed through the silvery branches.
Rob followed. He almost had to crawl in places, the network of pliant twigs scraping his back. Once, Vetch snagged the crane-skin bag, and tugged it free. Then he wriggled through a screen of leaves.
When Rob emerged after him, the poet was standing a little way ahead.
In front of them, over a lake of crystal clear water, rose a white, gleaming hill, smooth as a seashell. Around its sides crawled a chalk road, rising in terraces.
Vetch nodded, as if he understood. “Spiral Castle,” he said.
“You’re wrong.” Chloe stood up and marched around the crazily tilted room. “I only did it because if they’d hurt you, I would have felt it was my fault. That’s all. Blame Mac for lecturing me. He’s my godfather. Well, almost my godfather.”
In this caer there was no furniture. There were only seashells, vast and in heaps.
The King lay in an enormous oyster, eating cockles with a pin. As always his face was a mystery, but there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice.
“The truth is you’re beginning to like me. The prisoner always grows to like her captor.”
“I’m not!” She kicked the shells, wishing there were windows instead of the gleaming mother-of-pearl walls. “I hate you.”
“So you’ll escape again?”
“I might.”
He nodded, then swung his feet down and looked up at her. “If you hadn’t come back they would have given me to the forest, Chloe,” he said soberly.
“Who were they?” She came and crouched on the floor. “I couldn’t see much. The man with the candles had his back to me and the light was dazzling.”
“Intruders. They’ve broken in from above, found a hole that I thought was sealed centuries ago. There are three of them. I call them the Roebuck, the She-hound, and the Plover. Because these are some of the shapes they shift into. In the legends of Annwn they always come when the trees move. They’ll try and take you away and lead the trees against me.”
She snorted. “The trees seem to be doing a fair job by themselves.”
For a moment she sensed his old fear; then he shrugged and settled back into the shiny hollow. “Not here. Here the lake will keep them out.”
She stood, one hand on the pearl-smooth wall.
They had crossed the lake in a boat made of what seemed like an enormous yellow plastic cup, with an oar like a bent spoon; there were no bridges, he told her. Then he had drawn the boat up, and before she could stop him, he had taken a stone and smashed a great crack in the bottom, and
it had filled with water and sunk with barely a gurgle.
Annoyed, she had stormed in front of him up the chalk path.
It had spiraled around the hill, a white track that soon left her breathless. Wind had gusted against her, stinging her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. On each side of the path a border of pearls gleamed, like the double rope Dad had given Mum last Christmas, and between them some small white things that had seemed so puzzlingly familiar she had had to kneel and pick one up. Light, desiccated pieces of crust.
Breadcrumbs?
Coming behind her, he had laughed.
But once at the top, the view had dismayed them both.
As far as she could see in every direction, the forest marched. To the north it rose up to crown a low hill and to the east a ridge, long and narrow. It was as if the Spiral Caer was at the bottom of a shallow bowl of woodland, deep in a cauldron of trees.
Chloe bit her lip. Where was there to escape in all this? But she was determined to keep him unsure of her, so she folded her arms and glared at him. “So where’s this castle then?”
Under his mask, he had been smug. “Inside.”
The top of the white hill was flat; in its very center a spiral stairway had descended, an exact counterpart to the outside; this also widened as it went down. At first the walls were blocks of smoothed chalk; her fingers had caught their irregularities, the flattened ants and crushed grasses trapped between them. Then the spiraling corridor had begun to gleam; it had been like walking deep inside a vast seashell, like the one on her bedroom window at home, and the whiteness had become iridescent and the steps a long ramp of pearl and creamy shimmer, slippery underfoot.
Finally they had come to this room, seemingly the sole chamber, in the heart of the shell. Circular and windowless, its roof and walls and floor merged into one, vague reflections moving in it. And it wasn’t silent either, like the other caers had been; this one hummed, a low, constant hushing, as if around some bend the waves of the sea murmured on a distant beach.
Listening now, she said, “There’s no one else in here, is there?”
Darkhenge Page 13
