by Paul Kearney
Luca looks up at the sky, and scans the hills like a jackdaw, quick and sharp. ‘We has four hours or a little more ’til dark,’ he says. ‘I wants us to be up with the others afore then. ’Tis an evil time o’ the year to be traveling the Old Roads. All sorts turn up on the track, not just the Romani. The dark turn o’ the year brings out all manner of weirdness from the earth and the deep woods, and things that were sleeping wake up, and takes to the hills and the tracks and wanders where they pleases.
‘This is the fastest way to go, and there ain’t no villages or houses on the way. ’Tis open country, bare and empty, and we is easy seen, up here. We has to set a good pace.’
He looks me in the eye for the first time since offering me the dratted sock.
‘You up for this, Anna?’
‘Yes. But stop running ahead of me. I’m not going to stare at your back all day.’
He grunts, but gives a half smile. ‘Well, then.’
We walk on, side by side this time.
THE HIGH RIDGE seems a place taken out of time. To the north, I can make out the roads and villages of the world I know, a vast plain of them. And if I peer to my right I can see the rumpled folds of the hills go down into farmland and trees; but ahead there is only the grass and the stone-grey sky, the earth going up and down in enormous waves and swells, and nothing to measure it or break the spell of its emptiness except a few lonely clumps and dots of trees and the occasionally isolated barn.
I could have loved this place once, when Pa was alive and there was the old house to go back to, and a fire and a bed for the night. But now it only brings home more clearly to me all that I have lost. I feel that I have stepped outside anything that could be normal and ordinary, and the knowledge is not exciting at all. I feel sick and afraid, and I hug Pie to me and kiss her cold face. She is all that I have left now from that other life.
The sky breaks open in a bright blue maze and the cloud shadows shift across the face of the hills, tawny titans racing upon the wind. But the sun is westering, and our shadows are no longer behind us, but in front, and growing longer. I huddle in my coat and fight the pain in my middle and I want to talk to Luca about it, but that would not be right or proper it seems. And I know I am so snail-slow compared to him and I am holding us back, but there seems nothing left in my legs but weight to drag.
‘Idstone Hill,’ Luca says quietly. ‘Won’t be long now ’til the Long Barrow.’ He glances at the sky. ‘That is no place to be when the dark is thickening.’ He touches me lightly on the arm. ‘You gots to go faster, Anna. We can’t be this side o’ the Barrow if the light fails.’
‘I thought you liked the dark – what have you to be afraid of?’ I snap at him.
‘There’s worst things in the dark than me and mine,’ he says. ‘At this time o’ year, they says the Devil hisself goes up and down the old ways and paths, looking for lost souls to claim.’
‘What rot!’ I say. But even as I do, I feel a queer kind of sick feeling spread all through me, and I see again a white face hovering over firelight in the night.
15
THE SUN FADES as we travel, and if I watch it for any length of time I can almost see it sinking down the sky. I start walking faster.
‘What’s the moon doing tonight?’ I ask Luca. I have almost forgotten, in the strange rush of the day so far. I know it is important, but the significance of these things is still soaking in. There are train timetables in the world, and Bank holidays. And now there is the moon to wonder after too.
‘’Tis growing,’ Luca says. ‘Half full, and a year’s-end moon too.’ He takes my hand, and I almost jump at the warm touch of his fingers. My own are cold and stiff.
‘At this time o’ the year, ’tis hard to fathom how it will go with my kind. The urge is there, plain as day, but maybe it can be fought, and maybe not.’ He looks at me and smiles. ‘That is part o’ the fun of it.’
He does not look as though he is having fun. ‘How did this come to be?’ I ask him.
‘It is as it was,’ he answers, almost automatically. ‘There bain’t be no gainsaying it. This is nature, Anna. T’ain’t nothing we can do about it.’
‘Do you wish it was different?’ I ask him.
‘Sometimes,’ he says shortly. ‘But no sense crying over milk as has already been spilt.’
THERE ARE WOODS up ahead on both sides of the track, and as we approach them so Luca’s pace slows, and he begins to breathe more quickly, and his hand tightens upon mine. He keeps looking at the sky, and then he tugs me on until I am almost trotting and Pie is bouncing in the folds of my coat. The sun is well down in the sky now, a meagre, miserly sun, January at its selfish worst.
Luca stops in his tracks, looking at it. ‘The Long Barrow is up in yonder trees,’ he says, and his face has lost its ruddy health. It looks like parchment stretched over bone.
‘You has to hang on to me Anna, whatever you see. Don’t you be leaving go of my hand. You hear me?’
‘I hear you,’ I repeat. I catch his fear the way you can catch a yawn. I do not want to see what it is that can make someone like Luca afraid.
We walk on, more slowly now, and Luca is placing his feet on the pale chalk of the track as carefully as a dancer, while I clod alongside him. The evening darkens – I cannot believe how quickly the light seems to sink out of the sky, like wine pouring out of a bottle. And the trees grow close on either side. Beech and birch, and Scots Pine, overhanging the track and deepening the shadow. There is not a bird to be heard, just the faint rush of air in the branches overhead. We are in a wood which is stark and bare, and still it holds the gathering dusk in its grip. And on the left I glimpse something else through the trees, a great dark shape rising up out of the ground. It is a mound set in its own clearing, and surrounded by old beeches that are taller than houses.
I slow as we approach it. ‘Keep up,’ Luca says in a whisper. But my feet feel heavy, and it is as though there is a great cold stone in my stomach which wants to drag its way down through me to the clay and chalk of the path.
There is a light off in the trees, a flicker of fire by the black bulk of the mound, and as we creep on I am sure I hear the ringing tap of a hammer on metal.
We are level with it now. Fire leaps up in a red flag of flame and shadows are going back and forth in front of it along with the rhythmic tap of the hammer. Something large blocks out the light as completely as a curtain for a second, and I clasp Luca’s hand until our bones quake together and feel that I have to stop, that I cannot move another step. But he pulls on me, breathing hard, and something deep and liquid and animal-like comes out of his mouth, a low snarl. I tear my eyes away from the mound and see the light in his, as silver as the moon but washed with green. And his lips have drawn back from his teeth like the face of a frightened dog.
I think I hear a horse whinny, and the stamp of its hooves seem to echo in the very earth below us. I cannot drag my gaze away from the mound and the flicker of fire. The silhouette moves across it again, and it is man-like; but just for a second I am sure I see a rack of antlers on its head.
We stagger on two steps, then three more, and I can feel the weight in my bowels lift a little, but just as we are about to get by I hear a new thing. It is a low sobbing, someone in pain at the side of the track.
And in the trees there I can make out the tumbled outline of a fallen stone, a megalith twice my height. The weeping comes from it, a sound to wrench the heart.
‘Luca –’ I whisper.
‘Walk on.’
‘’There’s someone –’
‘Walk on!’
He has my hand in a grip I cannot break, and my arm feels limp as rope as he tugs on it. I crane my head around, searching in the dark. And I think I see someone lying on the ground by the great fallen stone.
No – he is half under it.
As we go by him the sobbing rises to something like a wail, an awful agony. A voice is talking through the sobs, saying things I cannot understand. It rise
s to a screech, and then bursts into a cackle of mad laughter.
The moment we are past the stone the laughter stops. As does the tapping hammer. It becomes easier to walk on, to stride normally again. It is as though we have managed to wade through a river and are on dry land once more. Luca’s harsh breathing begins to ease, and his awful grip on my hand loosens a little.
I look back when we are a hundred yards further on, when the dusk seems lighter and the trees less close. And I see a black shape stark against the pale chalk of the track behind us. It comes out of the trees and then disappears into them again, a worm of black shadow.
The light is gone now and the winter night is full upon us. When you are outside from dawn to dusk the shortness of the daylight is almost frightening. I can see why men reared up the great stones to celebrate the turning of the year and the long slow haul back into the bright seasons.
‘What was that?’ I ask Luca quietly.
‘It was an ancient thing,’ he answers, and his voice is as hoarse as though he had been shouting. But his eyes are dark and normal again.
‘Some say that the Smith-God hisself lives in the barrow, and they calls that place Wayland’s Smithy. There is something there, and it is old as these here hills, and I do not care to go near it.’
‘The thing that was crying –’
‘You hear the weeping and the laughing on a winter night at the turn o’ the year, and sometimes close to Midsummer too. The Smith’s apprentice, ’tis said, pinned under a great stone in punishment for slacking at his work.
‘Queenie says a great battle was fought here once, on the plain north of White Horse Hill. The last of the old folk who had been here since time began won a bloody fight against the incomers from the east, and they was led by their high king, Arthur, who rode a white horse and had it shod by Wayland hisself before the fighting began. Badon, that battle was called, and it was the last time the old folk of Britain won against the men of the east.’
‘King Arthur,’ I murmur. It is all too much. I am walking in the dark of a fairy-tale, caught in a strange story that no-one should have to believe is true.
Luca stops and stiffens, and he raises his head to sniff the air. Then he looks back along the pale track, and his fingers tighten in mine once more.
‘We gots to hurry, Anna. There are things awake tonight, things walking on the Downs we have no need to see.’
‘I thought I saw –’
‘Come on.’
I stagger as he lunges forward at almost a run, my knapsack bouncing on his back.
There is only the pain and the tiredness. They seem to muffle all the marvels of the night. We leave the trees, and the world opens out once more, a huge stretch of downland with the white track snaking across it. And the grey light grows until I can see my way quite easily and I realize the moon has risen and is rising up the sky as swiftly as the sun went down it such a short time before.
I feel a vague but powerful sense of some great prehistoric rhythm, as regular as the tap of the hammer in the barrow. As though the high downs are part of an immense timekeeping device which runs silent and unknown at the heart of an old, forgotten world.
The land rises steeply before us again, and there is a hill ahead on our left with the first stars blinking into life above it.
‘Whitehorse Hill,’ Luca says. I can see sweat shining on his forehead in the moonlight. ‘There’s an old castle up on the top, Uffington castle they name it. ’Tis but a bank and a ditch in the grass, made by the peoples who was here before the Romans. All that is sacred ground, to my folk and to the Roadmen too. If we can make it up there, they’ll likely leave us be for a while. This is their country, Anna. They set their mark upon it in the old time, carved out the White Horse before even Arthur fought his battle, back when men worshipped the sun and the moon. And maybe things before even that.’
‘I saw a shape,’ I say. ‘It looked like a man with antlers on his head.’
‘Don’t speak of it. And pray to your god that it stays where you saw it.’ Luca knuckles his eyes. ‘We just got to get to the hill, to the old castle. Tain’t far now. Put all else out o’ your head.’
‘Will Queenie and the others be there?’
‘I hopes so. ’Tis a great place to watch the land on all sides. Not a shrew could move upon the grass within a half mile of it without getting seen.’
‘Then they can see us coming.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping.’
Luca stares back down the track.
‘There’s no-one back there, now,’ I say.
‘The Roadmen can hide themselves like snipe when they’ve a need to. And they have beasts as do their bidding. Hawks, and owls by night. Come on. No good standing still.’
The slope steepens again, and when I look down I can see the white sludge of wet chalk has plastered my feet. It is getting colder, and the stars seem ice-bright, while the moon keeps rising silently up the sky and there is not another light to be seen in the world that lies below. As if all of England is empty and deserted and we are in some other era before gaslight and motor-cars and steam trains.
A bank looms on our left, and Luca is frowning now as we plod up the hill to the top. We stand up there on the roof of the world and he helps me up to the top of the dyke and there is nothing there within the turf ramparts except an open, empty space.
‘They ain’t here,’ he says, and he wipes at the sweat on his face again and the light of the moon leaps out of his eyes as he blinks.
He looks south along the ridge which continues from Whitehorse Hill.
‘Uffington Down, Kingston Down, Woolstone Down,’ he says, as though he were repeating the words of a song. ‘They wouldn’t go there. There’s farms in the valleys below, and too many a coming and a going, even by night.’
He turns. His breath comes out in a hot cloud.
Looking east, the track continues and the land begins to fall again before rising to a lesser height in the distance. There is a black line of what must be woods to the right of the track, down in the dip between the heights.
‘Boxing Hare Wood.’ Luca exhales, and I see even in the moonlight that his breath is coming and going in a cloud far greater and denser than mine, as though it is puffing out of a steam engine.
‘Where are they?’ I ask him.
‘They didn’t stop here after all, or we’d see some sign. There ain’t so much as a fire-scar on the grass.’ He bends and runs his hands along the turf, like a blind man reading Braille. ‘’Tis frosting fast. This night will be cold. We has to find them.’ He casts about at a crouch, almost on his hands and knees. As he draws away he looks like some beast snuffling on a scent. ‘Someone has been here, but they didn’t stay long,’ he says. ‘There’s prints of feet. They stopped and looked out a while, if I know anything.’
‘Queenie?’ I ask.
He shakes his head, and straightens. ‘One or two, no more. And they wore boots. ’Tis my guess the Roadmen was here, ahead of us, watching the track. If my folk saw ’em, then they would have gone on down from here.’ He points. ‘East. Boxing Hare is yonder long wood down in the valley, good for camping. Someone’ll be in it, either my folk or the others, but we can’t just stroll down and take a look.’
He runs his hands through his hair. ‘You’ll be safe here. They won’t come at you in this place. I’ll go take a looksee in the valley, sniff around the wood and see if Queenie is there.’
‘You’re leaving me? What about the Roadmen?’
‘You’ll be all right here, Anna. You can bet they know we is somewheres around here already. They been following us all day.’
I hug Pie. ‘You’re leaving me.’
‘Won’t be for long. You sit tight and quiet. Don’t be leaving the circle, and stay off the track.’
He lopes up the side of the bank and takes off his threadbare coat and tosses it to me. There is steam rising off him, rising from his neck and his bare forearms. He turns and smiles, and the light is burning brig
ht in his eyes and I see his teeth shine, and it seems that his face has changed, become longer, the bones even more pronounced.
‘Are you… are you changing?’ I ask him.
He says something, but it is not words I know, not words at all, as if the inside of his mouth can no longer make English. Then he bounds down the side of the bank and out of sight.
I scrabble through the stiffening grass and watch him go down the long open slope. He moves incredibly fast, sprinting upright, then in something like a crouch. In the uncertain moonlight I cannot be sure if he is on all fours before he is no more than a black dot on the pale track, speeding away into the night.
I sit there on the lip of the ancient dyke. I think of Achilleos and wily Odysseos, and the monsters they faced and overcame; but there is no comfort now in recalling the old stories Pa told me. They belong to another world, sunlit and hot and shimmering with the din of crickets in the grass, the sound of the sea.
This place is dark and bare and stark and I am shivering under a cold moon and there is not a sound except the wind coursing over the turf and even the streak of a falling star cannot bring it to life. It feels like a hidden place, though it is right here in the belly of England.
Perhaps men know that; perhaps they have always known it without thinking about it, which is why in this crowded little island it has been left alone, the time here measured in some way that is wholly different to the streets and railways and parks and gardens down below. It is not a wilderness; it is the opposite. A place where man has made some connection with the slow beat of the earth’s heart, carved his marks all across it in worship and wonder, and then left it alone as the reasons for his own awe have become lost and forgotten.
