The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  Rage made him slow to look up and slow, therefore, to realize that he was standing in silence because Fernandez de Aguilar was laughing too hard to answer.

  ‘I have said something amusing?’

  ‘No … Yes. Obviously … Yes.’ With the back of his hand, the captain wiped his beautiful shark-grey eyes. He produced a linen kerchief from his sleeve and blew his so-elegant nose.

  Shaking his head, he said, ‘Rigorous exercise? My God, remind me never to offend you again. Juan-Cruz, I am sure, will refrain from “rigorous exercise” if you have told him that it is necessary, and if he does not, it will be none of my doing. Nor will he or I or anyone else offend young Dominic, unless it is that the boy’s stutter catches the men on a bad day and they hurl him overboard in an effort to effect a cure. If you inform them it will not work, I’m sure they will listen. You are counted among the angels by those who believe in such things and among the gods by the rest, who do not.’

  ‘I would prefer that they view me only as a man who is doing his best, imperfectly, to learn the art and science of medicine.’

  He sounded frigid and could not help it. The captain shrugged.

  ‘You are far too late for that. Better to know your state and enjoy it. Better, also, to know that you are safe from unwanted attentions. On this ship, such things are not done. I was pandering to your more evident fears and I apologize, but I do believe it helps to have these things spoken aloud. If Dominic ends this voyage deprived of his virginity, it will be of his own volition. I thought you should know it.’

  So saying, de Aguilar nodded amiably, unhitched himself from the stern rail, and left.

  Owen sat down again. He stayed a long time, watching the quiet sun fall to kiss the sea before he stood up and retired to his cabin.

  He ate alone that night, on boiled beef, and slept badly. The next day, he abandoned his hose and stout shoes and went barefoot. Nobody commented, but he found by noon that he could walk more easily, and by dusk that he could stroll as he might have done along the banks of the Cam.

  Cedric Owen split his lip open on the heaving deck and tasted hot salt in all the cold salt of the sea.

  The slop bucket broke free of its moorings and the stench of a night’s shit and piss slewed around the cabin before the storm smashed over the bulkheads and everything was wet and cold and smelled of seaweed and harsh, unforgiving air.

  He woke, gasping, and brought his hand to his mouth. There was no blood and no pain. The Aurora swayed as gently as she had when he had first fallen asleep. The night smelled sweetly of a benign ocean, not at all as he had imagined. The blue heart-stone that shared his bunk rolled a little with the tilt of the waves and came to rest against his ribs, a warm thing in a warm night. He felt its presence as a sleeping lover, but that it was not asleep, and it had a message for him that broke the night apart with its urgency.

  Does it require your death, this stone?

  Nostradamus’ voice echoed in the small of Owen’s ear, even as he was already upright, dressing. His fingers fumbled for buttons in the dark, tucking in shirt tails so that he might present himself as a gentleman. He had long ago given up on his jacket, but he retained his shirt, even though the linen was harsh with salt and chafed against raw skin at his armpits and wrists.

  He yawned and grimaced and stepped out into a wide, black night, lit by stars he could not name and a dish-faced moon that flooded light across the flat sea.

  Behind them sailed three other merchant ships of a similar size to the Aurora, and far out on the port bow was a naval warship laden with cannon, set there to ward off privateers by her presence alone. Somewhere behind was another the same, although it was well known that the privateers set their targets on the rich ships returning from New Spain to the old country, not those going out.

  From the start, Owen had seen the warships as an insurance, not a necessity. With the perspective of the blue stone, he saw them newly as a burden to be shed, and quickly, only that he was not certain why or how.

  ‘Sir?’

  Owen scratched at the captain’s door. The sound was lost in the ruffle of waves and the slow thrum of the rigging. He knocked a little harder. ‘Don Fernandez, are you there?’

  ‘Señor Owen? Wait – I will come out.’

  The astonishing thing – one of the several astonishing things – about Fernandez de Aguilar was the speed with which he could don his outrageous doublets. He slept, obviously, with his fortune in gold in his ear, but he could not have slept in his doublet and emerged looking as fresh as he did now.

  Weeks ago, at the start of their voyage, Owen had made a small promise to himself that he would watch the man dress one day and see how it was done; but not this night, at this hour. Even as he thought it, the captain emerged decently sober in midnight blue with only a small prince’s ransom in his ear.

  ‘A beautiful night.’ De Aguilar braced a hand on the starboard rail and studied the Englishman. ‘May I ask what it is that has brought you out in it so late, and me with you?’

  ‘There’s going to be a storm.’ It sounded lame, there, under the flawless stars. ‘Bigger than anything we’ve seen already. It will break the convoy apart, possibly sink us. We need to …’

  Owen struggled for words. His Spanish had been serviceable at the start and, after six weeks at sea, was much improved, but he would have hesitated now in any language.

  ‘There are things that need to be done but I don’t know what they are. Only that you must do them so that we come through alive and so that, at the end of it, we are no longer part of the convoy.’

  ‘Not part of …? I don’t understand.’

  At least de Aguilar was listening to him, not sending him to his cabin with a draught of laudanum to keep the night-fears at bay.

  Owen said, ‘We must not cling to the other boats; that way danger lies. If we can steer clear of the others we have a chance; there are no privateers, but we must make our way to New Spain alone, without those who might hamper us, or alter our judgement.’

  ‘So? I said once you might try to captain my ship. I did not believe you would do it in truth.’ De Aguilar spoke thoughtfully, without the sharp pride of which he was capable. ‘Will you tell me how you know this?’

  It was Owen’s turn to stare at the sea. Nostradamus had pointed out that the blue heart-stone was a death sentence in the wrong company, but the concept was not news; those who held it had known the full weight of what they carried all down the centuries, and had grown used to the necessary subterfuges.

  Still, the lie came less easily than he would have liked and left a bad taste on his tongue.

  ‘As I told you once, my grandfather sailed with Sir Edward Howard. He spoke to me as a child of the peculiar smell the sea makes when a storm is coming; like iron that is made white hot then plunged into water. I smelled that now, coming from the port bow. The storm will come from that direction. As to the rest, I thought to compare your natal chart with that of the present moment, setting our location here on the ocean, as best we know it. I should have seen this far sooner, and deeply regret that I did not.’

  This part, at least, was true. More confidently, Owen said, ‘The Part of Fortune for this night lies conjunct now to Saturn and is in quintile aspect to your Part of Fortune, which lies in wide conjunction to your moon. If these two sat in opposition I believe we would see such a catastrophe as to die. Because they lie quintile one to the other, we may prevail through your courage and the use of your instinct.’

  De Aguilar stared out over the starboard bow. The sea rocked them a long time before he spoke again.

  ‘Perhaps one day you will honour me by sharing the truth. For now, we will believe there is a storm coming and wake Juan-Cruz and his men and tie down the rigging and alert the other boats so that they may do the same. Afterwards, if it proves not to be true, I will call the crews of all six ships together so you can tell them the story of your grandfather who so staunchly served the reiving King Henry, and I will let them cast
you overboard if they do not like your tale.’

  He grinned as he spoke. There was room to believe that he might have been in jest.

  The ship came awake startlingly fast. Juan-Cruz was already half dressed, his preternatural link to de Aguilar and the ship having given him some warning. His face showed no emotion as he listened to Owen’s fabricated story; he only swivelled his healing arm around his head and set to work on making the Aurora bend to the captain’s bidding.

  Within moments, whistles twittered in the rigging and flags were run up the stays, clearly visible in the moon-washed night. Sleeping sailors were shaken awake. Spanish sang from the yardarms of half a dozen ships, cursing the night and the crazy Englishman, and very carefully not cursing the captain.

  With nothing at all he could do, Cedric Owen retired to his cabin and sat on his bunk. The blue heart-stone lay under the blankets at his side. He felt a fresh alertness in its waiting, such as he might have felt from a hound at the start of a night’s coney-catching, knowing that it sensed beasts he would never see until they were retrieved to his hand, soft and warm and quite dead.

  He said, ‘You have never asked anything of me that I have not willingly given, but more men’s lives are at stake now than mine. Will you bring us safe to land as I have said?’

  The stone gave no answer; it had never done, but in the blue that inhabited his mind was a renewed peace, and a sense of almost-there, as of homecoming from a long and arduous journey. He turned on his side and lay on his bunk, staring at the moonlight that came through the cracks in the doorway.

  Quite soon after that, the wind began to thrum faster on the rigging.

  8

  Ingleborough Fell, Yorkshire Dales, May 2007

  STELLA WAS ALONE with the sheep and the skull-stone on the slopes of Ingleborough Fell.

  The night was cool, but not cold. Threads of cloud drew fine lines between the stars. High up, Fell Beck poured its black water into the blacker hole that was Gaping Ghyll. The stone was light in her backpack. She was beginning to understand the different feel of it. Here, now, neither she nor it were in danger.

  The low path by the stream gave way to a left-handed climb. She trod lightly through the bracken and it buoyed her along as it had done since she had woken in the hotel room, with Tony Bookless’s words sounding over and again in her ear.

  No stone is worth dying for … Get rid of it, Stella.

  She had gone to sleep hearing him and woken to his voice in the black heart of the night. The skull had made no protest; there had been neither blue lightning nor a screaming pain in her mind as she rose and dressed and drove out along the unlit lanes to the car park in the village at the foot of the trail.

  She walked up now, empty-headed, feeling the night air tight on her skin, and the drawn ache of muscles pushed hard the day before and not yet eased back to peace. Here, in the high place above the village, the air smelled of night-dew and bracken and sheep-oil. The sound of cascading water drew closer. She walked more cautiously, testing her footfalls, feeling the gradient before she set her weight on each foot.

  I don’t want to go in the dark … Yorkshire was her home. She had been to the Ghyll more times than she could count, but only in daylight, when the route was clear and the thundering spume of the falls clearly visible. She had no intention of wandering into the mouth and adding one last body to the count of the skull.

  Sheep stepped sleepily out of her path as she took the last steep rise and then over the elbow to the flatter landscape beyond. The slide and hiss of the waterfall called her on. At the half-remembered sheep fence, she stopped, and took a step back. Before her feet, the moor fell abruptly away. Fell Beck crashed down into the vast space of the cave beneath.

  In a world of greys and deep, sucking blacks, she sat on a slope of grassy earth, well back from the lip of the pothole. Ahead, the waterfall threw spray up into the starlight, the only touch of silver.

  She took the skull-stone from her pack and held it in her hands for the first time since she had sat shivering in the cathedral of the earth with its first blue flash still searing her brain.

  It was quieter now. The lime-chalk coating had roughened a little in the rub of her bag, so that it shed flakes into her palms and was smoother. Starlight gave it faint shadows; with her forefinger, she traced the outline of eyes and mouth and the vague triangle of the nose.

  In this light, shadowed and white, it looked enough like Kit’s bruised, broken face for her truly to hate it and the destruction it had wrought. Tony Bookless’s voice whispered in the rush of the water. It carries too much blood. Get rid of it …

  And yet …

  It was hard to surrender the passion with which she had first held the stone. Even underwater, cold and close to drowning, the sense of homecoming, of welcome, of a pact long made that she had forgotten and was only now remembering, had been overwhelming. Traces of it were left in the sharpness of her senses.

  A night breeze lifted spray from the beck and spattered it across the backs of her hands and her face. She picked a stalk of grass and chewed it. The broken stalk tickled her tongue. Sharp, sweet sap made her salivate.

  Closing her eyes, Stella searched for the touch of the heart-stone’s presence, for any sense of what it might give to mitigate the deaths that surrounded it. It had been with her all the way up the side of the beck. Unaccountably, now it was gone, or so quiet she could not feel it.

  She opened her eyes again. By a trick of the light, Kit’s face stared back at her from the white limestone, broken and vacant, plastic like a doll. Tony Bookless’s voice thundered from the falling beck and this time a passing shadow brought back the memory of a man passing beneath her feet in the cave, intent on Kit’s death. Her mind flinched from it, as her body had not dared to.

  Get rid of it!

  Gaping Ghyll gaped at her feet. Fell Beck fell the longest distance of any waterfall in Britain, into the cave below, and from that into an underground sump that made even cave divers blanch.

  She balanced the weight of the skull-stone in her hands and raised them for the throw.

  The shard of blue lightning in her mind was so far away, so tired, so old and worn, so nearly spent of all its reserves of calling. Or young, perhaps, like a lamb dropped from the ewe into the cold of a winter’s night that has cried all it can and not been fed, and grows weak from the bleating.

  Stella lowered her arms. With unexpected care, she cradled the stone to her sternum, feeling its rough chalk through the thinness of her T-shirt. Her heart beat for it, as it had only ever beaten for Kit, but differently; she had never wanted to protect Kit in the way she yearned to protect his lump of mucky limestone. Aloud, she said, ‘We should clean you up, make you whole again.’

  The blue spark flickered and held more strongly in the way of a candle taken from the draught that had threatened to extinguish it. Holding it close, Stella stood up and looked around.

  Dawn was near. The sheep were waking. The sky was lighter than it had been. Gaping Ghyll yawned more blackly and the beck dropped as fast. They waited, these two, with the same ancient intelligence as the stone she held. Instinct said they must be fed.

  She set the stone in her backpack, swaddled in a towel, and set to looking for a stone the same size and shape in the sheep-shorn turf.

  Her search took her in a wide circle, through the wire fence and out on to the moor until she found what she needed and brought it back.

  There was colour in the green moor when she returned, and a multitude of silvers in the falling beck. Only the pothole was the same vertiginous black. With the rising sun behind her casting a shadow across the water, Stella bowled the new-found stone underarm into the centre of the gap.

  It vanished terrifyingly fast. Some time later, she heard the shatter of breaking rock.

  ‘Well done,’ said Tony Bookless from behind her. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be able to do it.’

  She stood still. He completed his ascent of the fell. His shadow welded to he
r shadow, extending it, so that their twinned heads fell over the pothole.

  She said, ‘I dreamed of Kit. It seemed as if the stone … that it needed to come here.’ In a corner of her mind, the thing that had become a part of her held its breath, waiting.

  He said, ‘I heard you get up. When you didn’t come back, I thought you might need help.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She was back in the lie again, and this time the stone had not made her do it. She had no regrets.

  Bookless lifted his phone. ‘I just had a call from the hospital. Kit has regained consciousness. He’s asking for you. Will you come with me to see him?’

  9

  Aboard the Aurora, sailing alone in the Caribbean Sea, a half-day from Zama, New Spain, October 1556

  THE SEA LAY calm on all sides. For the first time in the week since the storm, the Aurora dared full rigging and ran lightly ahead of the wind. The air was alive with the rush and hiss of the waves on the bow and the flagging of sails on the three masts and the judder of the ropes and stays, and somewhere in the distance the long, forlorn cry of a sea-bird.

  Cedric Owen rose before dawn and came to stand with his back to the foremast at a place where the breeze of their passage pushed his hair back away from his face. Beneath his feet, the bow dipped and rose in a peaceful sea, sending waves creaming towards the stern.

  The night was much as it had been on the first day of the storm, but that they sailed alone now, with no boats before or behind. As the blue heart-stone had warned, the Aurora had become separated from the rest of the convoy in the chaos of wind and rain that had ripped at least one of the other boats apart.

  The Aurora’s crew had seen only one ship sink; the rest had been lost in the teeming rain and the savage, spiralling wind. Against all sanity, de Aguilar had spent two days sailing in circles in an unsafe sea searching for a sign of flag or sail or, more frantically, for living men among the wreckage that danced on the waves in ever smaller fragments.