by Robin Hardy
The frog had not been chosen.
Even as Howie stepped under the knot himself he was sure his theory was correct. Here comes the chopper clearly referred to the candidate to play the role of chopper …
The knot had descended over his shoulders. Howie could see the tense, excited expression of the baker-swordsmen who stood almost opposite him.
A beat-beat of the drum and the knot was raised. Howie found himself bounding forward, relieved at his own reprieve. Now he could be free to go down the line to look for Rowan, because the people who had been through milled about, just watching.
Then the music stopped.
Howie spun around to see who the knot had caught and was aghast to see that it was a young girl in a white robe with the garlanded head of a hare. He hadn’t remembered seeing her in the line. She was so obviously Rowan that he actually felt a surge of relief that at last she was going to be revealed alive.
The steel of the swords screamed as the knot was pulled suddenly tight, decapitating the little hare.
The headless body fell to the ground while the head itself flew some six feet in the air before falling among the gasping, screaming crowd. But then there was total silence as Lord Summerisle, Miss Rose, and Dr Ewan, the Boar, rushed towards the body.
For almost a complete moment Sergeant Howie was too stunned to move. He had stood and watched a murder. He had never seen the feat of ‘pulling-the-knot-tight’ so he had never dreamed it might be done. With the swords knotted he’d assumed them unusable.
He stared at the headless body and was disgusted to see it move. Like the proverbial chicken, he supposed. He was gathering his energy for the gargantuan task of arresting these people, and was about to take off his mask, when from the chest of the headless body a wicked laughing girl’s face appeared. Howie immediately recognized the brown-haired girl who had fallen headlong from the cupboard.
‘Well done, Holly!’ said Miss Rose. ‘You can come back to life now!’
Howie’s first reaction was one of relief mixed with bewilderment, then ‘back to life’ suddenly made him remember another phrase: ‘Death and Resurrection’. Howie wondered if that game he had just witnessed could be all they had meant by it. But it still left the sacrifice that had been announced for the beach and answered none of his questions about Rowan’s whereabouts.
The whole congregation was applauding and laughing and crowding around Holly, while the bemused sergeant examined the hare’s head. It was beautifully made so that it sat on the head of the child, who had obviously been given false shoulders in her cleverly made white dress.
‘To the beach, friends!’ Howie heard Lord Summerisle shout.
The crowd remained masked and streamed along a path that led to the cliffs and from there down a serpentine route to a pebbled beach. Howie went with them avoiding anyone, like Willow, whom he thought might want to talk to him. Miss Rose did speak to him as they waited to walk, in Indian file, down the cliffside path.
‘We’ll have to put you on the wagon next year, Alder. Or find a new Punch. It sets such a bad example for the young people to see you not taking your role as seriously as you ought. Shame on you, man! What have you to say for yourself?’
‘Nothing,’ Howie ventured in a low voice, from within the mask.
‘You’re incorrigible, Alder. Anyway I won’t scold you any more. This is a happy, holy day!’ said Miss Rose, preceding him down the path.
This left Howie relieved but, in the wake of the charade played out in the circle of stones, still utterly bewildered. He wondered if he dared hope that everything was to be symbolic. Yet he had a strong feeling that it was not to be. For the time being, however, his mind refused to grapple any further with the problem. He decided to abandon deductive reasoning in favour of simple, vigilant observation. Particularly since Punch appeared to have no role to play at the moment.
Glancing down at the beach, he noticed that the Suffolk Punch carthorses stood by the water’s edge, their dray loaded with the coffin and the huge barrels that he’d seen being wrestled up the ramp in the courtyard off the High Street. The ramp was in place again but this time it led down to the water’s edge. There must, Howie thought, be some other access to this beach, for they had certainly never got the horse and dray down the path they were all descending.
Howie noticed that the entire congregation, as soon as they reached the foot of the cliffs, walked hurriedly towards the horses and cart, falling on their knees in a semicircle around it. He joined in this movement keeping his eyes on Lord Summerisle, who appeared to have exchanged his mistletoe and sickle for a hefty axe. The laird climbed up onto the cart while two of the swordsmen wheeled one of the barrels so that it was poised on top of the ramp.
Lord Summerisle swept his axe through the air commanding complete silence, and everyone faced out to sea.
‘Shoney, God of the Sea!’ he declared in a voice so loud that he may have hoped it would be heard in the depths. ‘I give you this ale as a libation, that you may, in the year to come, bestow on us the rich and diverse fruits of your kingdom!’
Then with a mighty blow he stove in the side of the barrel with his axe. Beer and foam shot forth but Lord Summerisle was already kicking the barrel down the ramp where it whirred round and round spewing forth ale, until it fell into the sea with a great splash.
‘Hail Shoney! Accept our offering!’ roared the crowd.
Lord Summerisle was meanwhile dispatching the other barrel. Howie watched with the others as the barrel broke upon the incoming waves spreading a spume of foam and froth over a wide area. It really was a very childlike religion, he thought. Charades and giving their mythical gods goodies, like beer. As if a sea god would be thirsty, thought Howie, really smiling for the first time under his ceaselessly grinning mask.
Perhaps they were simply to be pitied as they played these apparently harmless games. Howie half-dared to hope that Rowan would appear, in the end, to be crowned carnival Queen and that everyone would go home, rejoicing, and he would find his fears had all been just a nightmare. Lord Summerisle turned to face the congregation, the lowering sun making him an awesome silhouette with his flying mane of black hair.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘for our more dreadful sacrifice. To those who command the fruits of the earth.’
Some distance away a horn sounded. The congregation turned to look down the strand to where the cliffs met the sea in a pile of enormous rocks. Upon these boulders stood four men with lighted flambeaux. Behind and beyond the rocks was a cave. In the mouth of which stood Broom, the piper, blowing a conch horn.
Not far from Broom, standing, in a white dress, her hands apparently tied behind her back, was a girl with reddish-coloured hair and a garland of flowers around her neck.
Howie recognized her at once.
It was Rowan Morrison.
CHAPTER XII
May Day –
Evening
THE HORN SOUNDED AGAIN. IT ECHOED SONOROUSLY in recurring waves, as if it were running along great subterranean passages and then returning.
The congregation had given a gasp that was the kind of sound a crowd makes when it has been waiting to see a great movie star, and there suddenly she is … in the flesh.
Howie was already running towards her. If MacGregor was a drunken disgrace maybe this is what he’d have done anyway, he thought. He could hear the congregation on the move behind him, but no one was actively pursuing him, yet. He watched for some movement from the flambeaux-carrying men standing on the rocks, who seemed to serve as sentinels to the cave.
‘What is it, Mr MacGregor?’ shouted one.
‘Alder’s had a snootful too much; let Broom deal with him,’ called another.
Sergeant Howie couldn’t believe his luck. When he got that close he’d deal with Broom. He so wanted to take his mask off now, to see a little more easily, but he didn’t dare. Having everybody think he was Alder MacGregor was winning him time. Now he had travelled along a path that led between the rocks. A
ll that remained between him and Rowan was a steep slope of slippery shingle and then came the flat rock that was at the entrance to the cave. Howie could see, as he started to scramble up, that Rowan was tied by a rope around her waist, that also bound her hands. Her wrists, in turn, were tied to a piece of stalactite rock. Light shimmered on the roof of the cave, leading Howie to hope that it might have another exit, perhaps to the next cove along the coast.
‘Wo-up there, Alder,’ Broom called down to him as if he were talking to a rogue carthorse. ‘This isn’t the night of the virgin springs, y’know. Have you no respect for the sacrifice, man?’
Howie scrambled up onto the rock and got his balance. Now he was ready.
‘I’ll blow an alarm if you don’t get down from here at once, Alder!’ cried Broom sounding suddenly scared.
Howie hit him so fast and hard, on the point of the chin, that Broom just crumpled. There were screams now from the congregation. Then a roar from Lord Summerisle.
‘Get him! Get him!’
Looking around at the strand and the nearby rocks, Howie could see he had about a minute and a half to loosen Rowan and start to try to get her away. The whole congregation was stampeding towards the gap in the rocks. The men with the flambeaux were jumping from boulder to boulder before scrambling the eight feet or so down to the foot of the shingled slope.
Howie meanwhile was with Rowan. The child was very pale and had tears in her eyes.
‘Oh, please get me away from here, Mr MacGregor,’ she gasped out to Howie, who, having lost fifteen seconds getting at his police knife by ripping through the Punch costume, was cutting her bonds one by one.
‘I’m not MacGregor. I’m a police officer in his costume. I’m going to get you away,’ he said, trying to reassure her.
‘You know what they’re going to do to me?’ she asked wonderingly.
‘I know. I know. C’mon, let’s get going,’ he said.
‘There’s a way out through the cave,’ she said.
The first flambeau bearer was on the rim of the rock. Howie kicked him square on the jaw, sending him sprawling to the bottom of the shingled slope.
‘Run, Rowan! Run! Run!’ he shouted, measuring ten yards between them and the next nearest pursuer. She was away and Sergeant Howie ran after her, flinging off his mask as he went.
They were inside a huge cave lined with stalactites and stalagmites. Through an opening to one side of the cave the sea ebbed and flowed, leaving a fluorescent, flickering light within. Rowan beckoned Howie to follow her and soon they were having to flatten themselves to crawl through a floor-level gap to another chamber beyond. It was pitch black in this other cave and very clammy. Only the echoing sound of Rowan’s voice, as she called out to him to hold the sleeve of her dress, told Howie that he was in a large enclosed space.
‘If we try to run we may fall into one of the rock pools,’ she said. ‘I can feel my way around the edge.’
‘What happens when one of them gets in here with a torch?’ asked Howie, feeling as vulnerable as a rat in a trap.
‘The bats,’ said Rowan, giggling. ‘Listen! It’s a game we always play on kids who come here for the first time, sending them in with a torch.’ Howie could just hear a very high-pitched twittering coming from above them.
‘We have to start climbing here,’ said Rowan. ‘Can you make out some light up there?’
Howie, whose eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, could see both the distant gap through which he’d come and a small hole above and beyond him, through which came a phosphorescent glow. He could also see that a man with a flaming flambeau was trying to edge his way into the cave by the way they’d come.
The added ambient light this gave enabled Rowan and Howie to clamber quickly to the yard-wide hole that led to the next cave. Rowan insisted on looking back as the flambeau carrier struggled to his feet. A thousand bats were swooping from the roof at the unfortunate man who was finding that, although some of the bats were immolating themselves in the flames of the flambeau, others were in his hair, on his face, everywhere. Screaming, he threw the brand into a rock pool and all was inky blackness once again.
Howie had now clambered into the next cavern and, before Rowan could warn him, found himself falling. Fortunately for him, the hump on his Punch’s costume caught and wedged him between some rocks lower down. Moreover, there was a great deal more light in this cavern. Howie could see a huge glittering green pool below him, which was clearly connected to the sea itself for a soft glow flooded in from a cave entrance below the ruffled surface of this pool. A small waterfall showered gently down from the roof of the cave far above.
Rowan was appalled at Howie’s mishap and hurried down the rock face to try to extricate him. Once again, when their eyes were accustomed to the new level of light, this didn’t prove too difficult. The child, who struck Howie as remarkably resourceful, used his police knife to cut off part of his upholstered hump. Then, with her help, they were climbing again, this time up, up, up inside a vast fissure in the cave’s ceiling. There were enough toeholds on either side and it was possible for both of them to brace themselves between the two walls of the fissure.
‘The really hard bit’s just ahead,’ panted Rowan, ‘but it leads out to the top of the cliff.’
Howie looked up and could see what she meant. The fissure closed ten yards or so above them. But before that there was a three-foot-high tunnel, from which the small euphonious waterfall sprayed down to the pool far below. The tunnel, which was the conduit for this stream, seemed to run at a forty-five-degree angle upward, and looked like a slanting hole in a petrified sponge.
‘“The mouth o’ the womb”, it’s known as hereabouts,’ said Rowan.
‘Don’t the adults know these caves just as well as you kids?’ asked Howie, a note of concern in his voice.
‘Oh, yes. But not the males, of course,’ she said.
‘Not the men? Why on earth not?’ he asked.
‘Well, we’re in the Grotto of the White Goddess, dedicated to the Earth Mother,’ she added, by way of explanation. ‘Miss Rose is the one we’d have to worry about, but at her age she’s not much of a climber, naturally. Also she’s terrified of bats and only comes in by the sea entrance at very low tide. I bet they’re hunting for us in the next cave. We could have swum out, y’know. But I didn’t want to risk you drowning.’
‘Thank you, Rowan,’ said Howie, touched to be the rescuer rescued. But he was still curious about the cave.
‘You mean men aren’t allowed in here?’ he asked, as he was struggling up towards the waterfall, led every step of the way by Rowan, who showed him where the footholds were.
‘Allowed?’ Rowan didn’t seem to understand.
‘Permitted,’ said Howie.
‘Oh, yes, of course. It’s just that they wouldn’t want to, would they? Men are a bit squeamish about revisiting the womb. Miss Rose says our female magic comes from there. It’s why I’ve always looked forward to becoming a woman. So that I’ll have my own magic. In a few months it would have been too late to sacrifice me.’
Howie, who was taking a short rest before crawling into the funnel-shaped tunnel, behind Rowan, wondered whether she meant that by then she would have reached her maturity, or lost her virginity. On this island the two events were probably almost concurrent, he thought bitterly.
He took a last look down into the phosphorescent cave with its rippling green pool and the white spongy-looking rock around it. For the first time his head reeled from vertigo as he realized that he was perched above a hundred-foot drop.
He scurried at once into the tunnel, finding that he could only move along it by crawling up the incline, his hands and knees and feet in the trickling water.
Five minutes later, after sometimes having to edge forward on his belly to make it under the overhanging rock, he could see that Rowan was silhouetted against bright light ahead. The tunnel along which the stream flowed, went straight on, but another fissure, in the cliff-top this ti
me, now made it possible for Rowan to stand upright, largely disappearing from Howie’s view.
‘It’s an easy climb from here,’ he heard her say.
Then he too was standing, looking up at the late evening sky. The scudding clouds were tinged with pink and the gulls hung lazily into the wind. It was a fairly easy climb except that Howie was quite exhausted from the painful journey he had already made. Three minutes later, they both emerged at the top and lay for a moment breathless on the coarse grass of the cliff-top heathland.
‘I’m sorry,’ gasped Rowan apologetically, ‘it was worse than I remembered it.’
‘Never mind,’ said Howie. ‘I think we’ve lost our torch-bearing friends.’
Even as he was saying this, Howie noticed a kilted swordsman, silhouetted against the sky on a nearby promontory.
He stood up quickly, as did Rowan. The sergeant protectively took Rowan’s hand in his. He was looking around to see who else might have caught sight of them when he heard a familiar voice.
‘Born again, eh, Howie?’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘How very propitious!’
They had emerged some fifteen yards from the cliff’s edge. In a dip nearby stood three figures. Howie saw them all at once and his heart sank. Lord Summerisle, Miss Rose, and Willow stood together like figures from a conversation-piece painting. All appeared to have changed from their costumes into clothes more suitable for a respectable stroll in the cool evening air. All gazed up at Howie and Rowan with unblinking recognition.
The sergeant completed his hasty three-hundred-and-sixty-degree survey of the horizon. All six swordsmen were posted where they could most easily intercept any attempt to escape. He looked quickly back to Lord Summerisle who stood, now, with his arms stretched wide open and a smile of quite beguiling sweetness on his face, looking straight at Rowan.
Howie felt the tug of her hand leaving his, and saw her running towards Lord Summerisle.
