by Manda Scott
‘Kit?’
‘Yes?’ He was miserable, and not truly cold, which was sometimes worse than freezing. He had not asked to see the skull-stone yet, which surprised her.
She said, ‘This is the best wedding present in the world. Thank you.’
‘We’re not out yet.’
‘No, but it won’t be long. The draught is all from east to west. If we go left of the waterfall, where we haven’t looked yet, I’ll bet there’s a walk-out that joins up with the White Scar complex and takes us out near the car.’
‘If it’s an easy walk, people would have been in here by the hundreds.’
He held her less tightly. They shivered equally now, which was an improvement. Stella wriggled from his grasp and wrestled with her pack, setting the skull-stone safe inside, close to the bronze pendant on which a dragon unfurled its wings beneath a high half-moon. She held out her hand for Kit to pull her up to standing and grinned into the tentative light of his torch.
‘OK, so there might be a bit of a climb. And maybe a tiny bit of a crawl through an entrance so small nobody’s been dumb enough to try it yet. But the poem said Find me and live, so we have to do exactly that.’
‘Bravely and together?’
She thought he had forgotten saying that. She pressed a kiss to his hand. ‘Absolutely. Come on, we’ll make a caver of you yet.’
They had climbed and crawled and were on the second pitch of a downward climb when Stella heard a stone fall in the darkness. She was standing at the belay point, winding in rope.
She looked up, letting her torch beam catch Kit’s feet. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘Other than the blood rushing in my ears, the chattering of my teeth and the premonition of my screaming body falling ten thousand feet into the centre of the earth down this devil’s climb you’ve magicked out of nowhere? No. What I would like to hear is the sound of traffic and real, live people. We’ve been in here for eternity.’
‘Two hours. That is, two hours since we left the cavern. Four hours since we last saw daylight. And it’s nowhere near a ten-thousand-foot drop. Nothing in Yorkshire’s more than four hundred, tops.’
‘That’s enough to kill us when we fall off and hit the bottom.’
‘We’re not going to fall off.’
It was not even a four hundred foot drop, but it was not trivial either and they were climbing down, which is always harder than up. For an avowed non-climber, Kit was coping astonishingly well. And he was cheerful again, which was little short of a miracle.
Stella stood to one side of the ledge keeping the belay safely taut, but not so tight it pulled him off the rock.
His feet reached her first, and then his hands and he was down beside her.
‘Where now?’
She tipped her torch on to her plastic map pocket. ‘If the charts are right, this ledge is part of the White Scar complex, but quite far in. We’re on a route that was only opened up nine months ago. It’s not surprising nobody found the way into the chamber. It’s hard enough getting along this ledge; anything else would need specialist equipment and a team who knew exactly what they were doing. We’ll be fine as long as we don’t stray into Gaping Ghyll.’
‘The pothole with the river falling into it?’
‘The pothole with the longest waterfall in England falling into it, with the biggest cavern below it and a sump below that. If we needed to climb out, it’s eight pitches of extreme rock with water tumbling past our ears and neither of us is up for that.’
The Ghyll was her home territory, the place that had brought her to caving and left her wanting more, but not so badly that she wanted to be lost in it.
She traced a line with her index finger. ‘As far as I can tell, this ledge carries on for about half a mile to a fork where we take a left. After that, the ledge gets narrower and the drop deeper. If we’re lucky, there’ll be bolts and a rope to hold on to but even if not, as long as we don’t go near the edge, it’s a cake walk.’
‘A cake walk …’ Kit let his light play over the side wall, and the ledge and the black nothingness below. Experimentally, he kicked a stone from their ledge. It rattled briefly against the side and then fell in absolute silence to a floor that was too far away to hear.
‘And you do this for pleasure. Stella Cody, you are certifiably insane and I’m as bad for having married you. Remind me to divorce you as soon as we see daylight. Mental cruelty. No contest.’
He reached for her shoulder and squeezed it, softly. His accent was barely Irish. He was no longer shaking from either cold or fear. She tried to remember her first cave, and how long it had taken her to learn to love the fear as much as the dark.
He dug out his water bottle and drank, then passed it to her. The slosh of water very nearly covered the clatter of a distant stone.
She said, ‘There!’
‘What?’
‘A rock fell.’ She said nothing more. How to tell him that the skull-stone was coming alive, that she could feel its presence on the edges of her mind, and that it sensed danger nearby? ‘There was one earlier,’ she said. ‘Before you came down.’
‘In the middle of a mountain, made of rocks piled on rocks, you heard a rock fall on to another rock?’ He flashed his head-lamp at her face, dousing her with light. ‘Is that unusual?’
His buoyancy was infectious. She wanted to float on it all the way home. The skull-stone twanged at her nerves. She smiled, to bring him down gently. ‘It is, actually. You only ever hear rocks fall in caves when there’s somebody sending them down, like you just did. I think we have company.’
‘Do we mind company?’
‘Possibly not, but we’re in an unknown part of an unmapped cave and we’ve just picked up an artefact that people have been hunting for the past four hundred years. Before that, it has a long history of associated violence. If someone else wants the stone badly enough, he could add two skeletons to this cave and who would ever know? I think we should keep moving, and try not to make too much noise.’
‘Stell, that was definitely a rock bouncing on another rock.’
‘I heard it. And the one before. They’re coming at thirty-second intervals.’
The ledge on which they walked had narrowed to less than eighteen inches across. Stella kept her torch beam angled so that the light overlapped her feet and she never stepped further than she could see. There were no bolts and no rope to hold on to. Empty blackness yawned to her right, with that sucking magnetism that drew in living bodies and made them dead. Gravity sucks. Every caver knows that underground it sucks more strongly. Stella had never mentioned that to Kit. She said, ‘Whoever’s following doesn’t mind us knowing he’s there. Actually, he wants us to know.’
‘What do we do?’
‘If I said that the skull-stone thinks we should run like fuck, would you divorce me again?’
She was the one sounding Irish now. He always said she had a chameleon accent and it came out under stress, striding west from Yorkshire to Dublin with each rising notch of adrenalin.
‘Pass. I need to have notice of that question. Does it say why?’
Kit was making such an effort to sound calm. She loved him, just for that. She said, ‘It doesn’t want to meet whoever is behind us.’
‘A stone-hunter?’
‘Of the nastiest sort.’
‘The type that leaves skeletons behind?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Let’s run then. Last one to daylight’s a chicken. Can we switch off our head-lights and hope to stay alive?’
‘Definitely not. And we can’t run. We can just walk a bit faster.’
‘Kit!’
It came out muffled, into neoprene. His hand was over her mouth, the other fumbled with her light and switched it off. His own light had already gone. His whole body held her against the rock. They stood in absolute dark, with a drop of unknown depth eighteen inches away. Somewhere, not so far back round a left-hand bend of sixty degrees, a rock tumbled quietly to nowhere
.
‘Whisper.’ Kit’s voice in her ear. ‘We’re being herded, not hunted. Whoever it is wants us to go faster. Is there something bad we’re going to blunder into up ahead? Or does this ledge simply run out and leave us nowhere to go?’
The chart, such as it was, was burned into her mind. ‘There’s a pinch point two hundred metres from here. The chart doesn’t define it in any more detail except that it’s hard. There should be bolts and a rope by then.’
‘But if we’re pushed too fast, we’ll miss them, and then we’ll go over.’ Kit’s lips were on her forehead, beneath her lamp. There was no fear in him now, only a bright, sharp anger that could move mountains. ‘So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll take your spare light so it looks like there’s two of us and go ahead fast and messy. You wait until the bastard has passed you and come up behind. If he’s trying to push us off, he won’t get both of us, and if we’re lucky you’ll get a good look at who it is. Just don’t do anything about it down here; wait till we’re safely back in daylight.’
‘Kit, that’s madness. Which one of us is the caver? If we’re going to split, let me go ahead.’
He shook his head; the shiver of it ran through his shoulder to hers. ‘I’ll have both lights. You’re the one left behind in the dark.’ He bent down so their heads were level. She could feel the shine of his eyes. ‘Stell, don’t you trust me?’
A stone clattered, closer than before. Urgently, Stella whispered, ‘It’s not about that.’
‘OK, but you’re the one with the skull and it needs to be protected. Find me and live – remember? You can climb up the wall and get out of sight and out of the way. I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it.’
She had no answer to that. He gripped her arm, taking silence for agreement. ‘How much more after the pinch point before we see daylight?’
‘About half a mile of easy going and then you’re in the main Battlefield chamber. It’s one of the biggest showcase caves in England; all fluorescent stalactites and prehistoric mud-pools. A hundred tourists a day do it with their eyes shut. It is a walk-out from there.’
‘Sorted.’ His hands clasped her face and hugged her close. They clashed, head-lamp to head-lamp, and sketched the barest kiss. ‘I love you. Now give me your underwater light and I’ll see you back at the car.’
She loved him. She gave him her second light and listened to him make noise enough for two, if those two were trying to be quiet. He was right; he could move faster alone than when he was following her; he was less cautious.
The dropping of stones halted for a moment and then came along faster. You can climb up the wall and get out of sight and out of the way.
It was madness. It was necessary. Blindly, she felt for handholds in the rock wall at her side, making herself a gecko, a squirrel, a tree-frog, able to adhere to wet limestone and never fall back into the swooping, sucking dark.
Footholds came to her hand, and then her feet; small nubs of rock that accepted her offer of neoprene and held it. She turned her face sideways to the rock, and glued her cheek to it, breathing in the wet, hard stone, as if breath alone might hold her.
Space loomed out and down and round and all that kept her alive was four points of damp rock. She tasted gritty, earthy mud, full of salt and silt, and did not spit it out, but opened her mouth and welcomed it as another way to glue her to the rock. She did not allow herself to think how she would get down.
He came soon, whoever he was; a passing solidity of flesh and breath and the smell of male sweat and neoprene and mud, that moved fast, and sure-footed, with only a pinprick of light.
He did not look up to where she was, even when the skull-stone screamed a furious warning and flashed a spark of pure blue lightning that existed, as far as she could tell, only in her mind.
She waited a long time, holding to wet rock with fingers that were locked with fear as much as cold. The sound of padding feet died to nothing. Kit was long gone.
‘Kit, please God, Kit, be safe.’
Silence answered her, with no falling stones.
When she had counted a thousand, and again, she risked her light. The ledge was far narrower than she had thought, the handholds smaller. There was nothing but blackness beyond it, and the sucking void of vertigo.
She flexed her fingers and jammed them in a crack and lowered herself down, on to toeholds that sloped down and out, to a ledge that was exactly the width of her two feet set toe to heel. Beyond it, her light probed the darkness and saw nothing. She risked a lean forward and sent the light straight down the cliff’s edge. The beam reached two hundred and fifty feet and did not touch the rock bottom. She turned her lamp forward, and began the long walk out.
The chart did not lie: the pinch point was difficult. What it did not say was that the ledge narrowed to eight inches and began to slope outwards, tipping her gently, softly, subtly towards the dark. Its treachery was supported by the wall on her left shoulder which had, until now, been her friend, her support, her safety in the world of sucking gravity. Now it, too, began to lean against her, pushing her ever outwards, easing her centre of gravity over the lip of the ledge.
Walking was an act of will. When it became impossible to walk, she dropped on to her hands and knees and crawled, feeling her way along a ledge barely big enough for her two knees. Her right hand gripped the angled edge. Twice, it slipped away, tipping her sideways, outwards. Gravity sucked. She spat back. The skull-stone sent its weight left, to keep her on the rock. Kit … please tell me you didn’t try to walk this.
When it became impossible to crawl, she dropped on to her belly and stretched her arms out in front of her and used her left hand only to pull herself forward and inward, against the quiet whispering darkness that said how easy it would be to let go and roll gently off to a place of no resistance.
Find me and live. She took that now as a promise, to both of them.
She reached a place of safety and knelt upright, sobbing with fear, talking to herself in savage bursts through teeth that clattered too much for coherent speech.
She drank water and made herself steady. With some effort, she built a picture of Kit, alive and whole, waiting for her at the cave’s mouth.
Unaccountably, the thought of him made her weep.
‘Kit … Please be safe.’
The touch of his voice echoed in her head. I’ll see you back at the car.
She looked at her watch. It was barely two thirty in the afternoon; five hours exactly since she had last seen daylight. Aloud, she said, ‘I’ll be at the car by three o’clock. We’ll have a late lunch at the hotel. Or, better than that, we’ll order room service and stay in and celebrate our wedding present.’
She stood in a wide tunnel, with no threat on any side. The rock was dry and smooth and sloped upward at four or five degrees. Somewhere, in the far distance, was the first taste of greyness in all the black. Stella Cody checked her compass, her chart and her watch, hitched her backpack higher on to her shoulders and began to run towards the light.
Very quietly, so that she had to strain to hear it, the skull-stone sang a single note of warning.
3
Paris, August 1556
PARIS LAY ASWEAT under the pall of summer.
Smoke from the cook-fires hung as a blanket over tiled rooftops and the stench of sewage clogged the streets. Life slowed almost to a halt. In the streets and alleyways winding on either bank of the Seine, there was nothing to be done but wait for rain or wind or, if God were good, both, to clear the air and flush the gutters.
Some things took no notice of the heat: birth and death amongst them. Thus did Cedric Owen, known to those around him as M. David Montgomery – ostensibly a Scot with loyalties entirely given to France’s most serene majesty and his ally the Pope – find himself up to his arms in the slime and gore of a difficult childbirth.
It was his fourth since coming to France. The first had gone well and so earned him a reputation amongst the street folk to whom he ministered. The sec
ond was for the wife of a tailor who had once sewn the points on to the hose of M. de Montpelier, who was something small at court.
The third came at night and he was called from his bed by a man who rode a horse and carried his own sword. The woman brought to bed was his mistress and her white linen sheets were ripped up to make staunching pads when she bled. That she survived was considered a minor miracle, the majority of which was attributed to Owen’s refusal to countenance the use of leeches. The woman’s lover, it transpired, was a cousin of M. de Montpelier and something rather more substantial at court.
And so, without any wish or effort on his part other than to follow his chosen profession, on the afternoon of the seventeenth of August, less than three weeks after his arrival in France, with Venus now at the mid-point of Libra and Jupiter in kind trine to Mars, Cedric Owen came to attend a chambermaid to the Queen, gone into labour nearly a month before her time and like to give birth, so wailed the women attending her, to a hare or worse.
She was not giving birth to a hare, but perhaps not much better. Naked to the waist, Owen lay on floorboards at the foot of her birthing-bed with his eyes shut, the better to see with his fingers, which were at full length inside, at the place where the babes lay. He felt bad news.
His French was passable and they thought his accent Scottish and charming. Speaking thus, he said, ‘My lady, I feel two heads. You are about to be delivered of twins. Whether they yet live or not, I cannot say, but the Part of Fortune, if calculated by the modern method, lies at this time of the day in the constellation of Gemini which can only be to the good.’
Her face was a long way beyond the beached mound of her belly. Her eyes sought his and he gave her what compassion he could, knowing the intimacy of the moment, greater even than the moment of conception, and wishing not to taint it.
More gently, he said, ‘The two babes are evenly placed in your womb. I must send one back to allow the other to advance. Have I your permission, and that of your husband, to choose which of your children is to be born first?’
