Ysabel

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  They wouldn’t have been scattered if Melanie had done them, he’d thought. She’d have stacked and sorted and filed the pages. With coloured tabs. Of course, if Melanie had been around they wouldn’t have needed those notes, would they? He’d just finished looking up something and was feeling even more depressed and confused.

  “What’d you find?” Kate said, coming over.

  He glanced up. She was barefoot, wearing only one of his own oversized T-shirts. He said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that bit up there, before, ‘God will know his own.’”

  “Oh. Right.” She made a face. “Siege of Béziers? It’s west of here.”

  “Yeah, I found it. In 1209. ‘Kill them all.’ Pretty unbelievable.”

  In the muted light and the quiet, her body under the T-shirt and long legs below it were suddenly way too distracting. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about that at a time like this, were you?

  Steve and Greg had been at the other end of the room, slumped on the big couch watching television—The Matrix, dubbed into French, which might have been pretty funny any other time. Ned’s father was on the computer upstairs, emailing, and Aunt Kim was showering. Kate was just out of the shower herself, her hair still wet.

  “They were after heretics down here,” she said. “It was like a crusade. Those tended to be vicious.”

  “Yeah, but from what Phelan was saying, the one who spoke those words—”

  “Was with Cadell, I know. And our guy was inside.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Is he our guy?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What does all this mean? Like, if they are supposed to battle each other for her, how do armies come into it?”

  Kate looked away, out the window into darkness. “Maybe sometimes they fight and one gets killed, but sometimes she makes a choice, and they both live, then the other one goes to war?”

  “You’re just guessing.”

  She looked back at him. “Well, of course I’m just guessing.”

  He sighed. “Sorry. Sit down, eh?”

  “No way. This shirt’s too short. This is all the leg you get.”

  He smiled. “Want my sweatpants?”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Uh-huh. I should make a bad joke now, right?”

  “Probably. Wet T-shirt or something.”

  “It isn’t wet.”

  “I was careful. I’m a good girl. And you’re obviously the kind of guy who’ll do anything to get a woman to sleep over.”

  “Oh, yeah. Druids and blood. My usual. Never fails. You call Marie-Chantal?”

  She nodded. “She was shocked.”

  “Really?”

  “No, idiot. But she did want to know what you looked like.”

  Ned blinked. “What’d you tell her?”

  “I said you looked Canadian. G’night, Ned.”

  She turned and went towards what had been Melanie’s room the night before. Ned was left at the table, images lingering of how clean and fresh she’d looked, her wet hair and her dancer’s legs.

  Then he thought about Melanie, and the lean, fierce man he’d first seen in the cathedral. Imagined that one leading a red slaughter by the mountain, then casting men alive down a pit, the way she said Marius had done. He could see it, that was the problem.

  I am not a good man.

  And if he was understanding anything at all, the other one, Cadell, had burned a city, Béziers, eight hundred years ago, with Phelan inside—and maybe Ysabel, whatever her name was that time.

  Revenge? Was Kate right? Had Ysabel made a choice, picked Phelan that time, but Cadell hadn’t died? Had he made that crusade, or just made use of it?

  Might that be why one of the men needed to be killed, so her choice was made that way, or else this part of the world could drown in blood?

  Had it been the same at Pourrières, where Ned had felt he was drowning in the slaughter? Or was this all so far off base it wasn’t even funny?

  And what did a Canadian look like, anyhow?

  IN THE MORNING they’d gone back to Entremont first, on the off chance someone had lingered there. The gate was locked, though, the parking lot empty. It was the first of May, a holiday in France. But it didn’t matter: Ned could feel it, there was nothing here. Whatever had been on this plateau during the night was gone. He wondered if the remains of the Beltaine fires would be there if they climbed the fence and went in.

  He thought about the bull. How would the guard or the first tourists tomorrow deal with that? Not his problem, he supposed. His problem was a lot bigger.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in his aunt, but the hard fact was, if they were actually going to check out all the sites near Aix that had connections to Celts or Greeks or Romans, they were going to need months, not three days.

  And they might not even have three days. There were others searching, after all.

  The plan, such as it was, had been worked out earlier the evening before. Those had been the notes on the table. Kate, scribbling place names as fast as she or Ned’s father or Aunt Kim could rattle them off, had begun biting her lip part of the way through, he remembered.

  It was pretty unbelievably random, Ned had thought, watching the list grow.

  GREG TOOK THE MOTORWAY EXIT for Arles and paid the toll. It was a fresh, blue-sky holiday morning, a day for a walk, a picnic, a climb. They continued west for a bit but got off before the city to go north on a smaller road towards a low, spiky range of mountains.

  Ned saw vineyards on both sides, and olive trees, their leaves silver-green in the light. There were signs showing where you could pull off to buy olive oil. It was beautiful, no denying it. He had no idea how any of them were supposed to enjoy scenery today, though.

  Aunt Kim’s plan had been that she and Ned, with their links—however imperfect—to the world of the rites that had taken Melanie, would each anchor a team. They’d use the van and her little red car to criss-cross towns and ruins and the countryside. If either of them got even the glimmer of a sensation, any kind of presence, they’d telephone the others and . . .

  And what? That was the depressing part. Even if, by whatever miracle of intuition or luck, they actually found the place where Melanie-as-Ysabel was hiding from the two men, what were they supposed to do?

  Ask her nicely to change back?

  Ned remembered that he’d put the question more or less in those words the night before. He’d been sitting next to Kate, looking at the list she was making: Glanum, Arles, Nîmes, Antibes, Vaison-la-Romaine, Orange, Fréjus, Pont du Gard, Roquepertuse, Noves, Narbonne, Saint-Blais, Hyères. He’d stopped reading there, though Kate kept on scribbling.

  Glanum—whatever that was—was their next stop this morning. The red car was going to Nîmes, farther west, and a couple of the other sites that way.

  They were all pretty much just names to Ned. And there were way too many. It felt hopeless. There were even connections to Greeks, Romans, and Celts in Marseille itself, and Marseille had three million people. They could spend days there.

  And what was the point, anyhow? Did they wander the streets calling her name like someone looking for a lost cat? And which name, even? Melanie or Ysabel?

  It was Steve, surprisingly, who’d nailed him on this last night.

  Steve’s attitude had changed almost completely, right after Greg had added his voice to Ned’s, explaining the events on the road, including the druid’s long-range flattening of him. Greg had credibility, it seemed. Came with a bruised sternum. And he hadn’t even seen Cadell change into an owl, Ned thought.

  Ned had seen it. Twice, now. What did you do with that memory?

  Steve had said, from by the terrace doors, “Ned, if we don’t have anything better, this is what we do, man. If we find her, we figure out a next step. We’re not going to just sit here, are we? Or go around taking photos as if nothing’s happened?”

  “No, we’re not going
to do that,” Edward Marriner had said.

  “And it makes no sense to be pessimistic,” Greg added, sitting a little stiffly on a dining-room chair. “I mean, this whole thing is so off the wall, why shouldn’t we do something off the wall and fix it, eh?”

  Ned looked at him.

  “You sound like Melanie,” he said.

  Greg hadn’t smiled. “Someone has to, I guess,” was what he’d said.

  Ned was thinking about that, too, as they continued north towards the sharp-edged mountains, passing tourist signs for a place called Les Baux. What did Melanie sound like? How did she think? What was there about her that he could try to sense, or locate?

  Or did that even matter? Was it more a question of thinking about Ysabel, instead, reborn into the world so many times? So dangerously beautiful it could scare you. He did get scared, in fact, remembering how he’d felt last night, looking at her, hearing that voice.

  Or maybe it was the two men, maybe they were what he should be searching for, inwardly? But what was the point? It was pretty clear they had no clue where she was—that was the whole idea of the challenge she’d set them. That’s why Cadell and the druid had come looking for Ned, wasn’t it?

  He considered that for a bit. They drove past a farm with horses and donkeys in a meadow on their left. There were plane trees along a dead-straight east-west road they crossed. Another sign pointed the way to a golf course.

  “She wants them to find her,” he said.

  His father turned around in the front seat.

  Edward Marriner had insisted on being with his son today. It made sense, anyhow. Ned and Aunt Kim had to be in different cars. Kate was with Kim because she was the only one besides Ned who could recognize Ysabel—or Phelan, for that matter. Steve went with the two of them, as protection, for what that was worth. Ned had his dad and Greg.

  His mother had phoned very early. She was taking a military plane from Darfur to Khartoum, then a flight to Paris and connecting to Marseille. She’d be with them by dinnertime.

  “What do you mean, she wants them to?” Edward Marriner asked. His father looked older this morning, Ned thought. A worried man, lines creasing his forehead, circles under his eyes. He probably hadn’t slept much either.

  Ned shrugged. “Nothing brilliant. Think about it. Ysabel doesn’t want to stay lost. This is a test for them, not mission impossible. She’s choosing, not hiding.”

  “Which means what?” Greg asked, eyes meeting Ned’s in the rear-view mirror.

  “Means Aunt Kim’s right, maybe,” Ned said. “There should be a way to find some place that . . . connects up. Or makes sense. I mean, they have to do it, so we can too, right? There has to be some logic to it?”

  “Well, it would be easier if we could narrow it to a bit less than twenty-five hundred years,” his father said.

  “Now you sound like me last night,” Ned said.

  Greg snorted.

  “God and His angels forfend,” his father said, and turned back to watch the road.

  Edward Marriner was carrying two cameras, a digital and an SLR. More for comfort, Ned thought, than anything else. It had occurred to him, getting into the van, that on the viewfinder side of a camera you had a buffer between you and the world.

  There were a lot of ideas coming to him these days for the first time. Looking out the window, he saw the turnoff for Les Baux coming up. Traffic slowed as cars made the left.

  “Straight on, Gregory,” Edward Marriner said, checking the map. “Road goes to Saint-Rémy, we pull off just before.”

  “I got it,” Greg said. “It’s on the signs.”

  “What is that?” Ned asked. “Up there? Les Baux?”

  “Medieval hill town, castle ruins. Pretty spectacular.”

  “You’ve been?”

  “With your mother, before you were born.”

  “On our list?”

  “Not for this. Oliver and Barrett have it down for the book. Though it probably could be for this, too. Best I gather, the Celts were all over this place before the Romans came.”

  “It’s way up there,” Greg said. “Look close.”

  They were waiting for the cars ahead of them to turn. Ned looked out the left-side window. What appeared at first to be crumbled rock was actually the smashed-up remains of a long castle wall at the top of the mountain. It blended in almost perfectly.

  “Wow,” he said.

  His father was looking too. “They used to throw their enemies from those walls, the story goes.”

  “Nice of them. When?”

  “Medieval times. The Lords of Les Baux they were called. Louis XIII sent cannons up to the castle a few hundred years after. Blew it apart. Thought it was too dangerous for local lords to have a fortress that strong.”

  Ned shook his head. The Romans with siege engines at Entremont, same thing here with cannons.

  “I thought you told me we were coming to a beautiful, peaceful place.”

  His father glanced back. “I’m sure I told you beautiful. I doubt I was so foolish as to say peaceful.”

  “Besides,” Greg said in a joking voice, “when do fifteen-year-old dudes want it peaceful?”

  “Could use some about now,” Ned said.

  They came up to the intersection, waited for the car ahead to go left, and carried on through.

  “This next bit here’s called the Valley of Hell,” Edward Marriner said. “Melanie has a note it may have inspired Dante.” He had her notebook, among the other papers he was carrying.

  “He was here too?” Greg asked.

  “Everyone was here,” Ned’s father replied. “That’s sort of the point. There were popes in Avignon for a while, long story. Dante was an emissary at one time.”

  “I can see it,” Ned heard Greg saying. “Valley of Hell, I mean. Look at those boulders.” The landscape had become harsh and barren quite suddenly as they wound a narrow route between cliffs. A few splashes of colour from wildflowers seemed to emphasize, not reduce, the bleakness. It was darker, the cliffs hiding the sun. It felt lonely and desolate. Looking around, Ned began to feel uneasy.

  “Barrett has this place down too,” Edward Marriner was saying. “For the landscape. Another side of Provence.”

  But his voice had retreated, seemed somehow farther than the front seat. There was something else, inside, pushing it away. Ned took a deep breath, fighting panic. He didn’t feel ill, not like at Sainte-Victoire, but he did feel . . . distant. And really odd.

  “Can you stop for a second?” he said.

  Without hesitation, without a word, Greg swerved the van onto the shoulder, which was not all that wide. The driver behind them—close behind them—blasted his horn and shot past. Greg came to a hard stop.

  “What is it? Ned?”

  His father had turned again and was looking at him. The expression on his face, a mixture of fear and awe, was unsettling. A father shouldn’t have to look at his kid like that, Ned thought.

  “Feeling something,” he muttered.

  He searched inwardly. Nothing tangible—only a disquiet, like a pulsebeat, a faint drumming.

  “Does . . . do we have anything on what’s here? What might have been around this place?”

  Edward Marriner pulled a notebook from his leather case on the floor. There were labelled, coloured tabs separating it into sections. His father flipped through, found a page, skimmed it. He shook his head.

  “There were quarries for bauxite, which gets its name from Les Baux. Those are finished now. She mentions the Valley of Hell. Dante. A quote from Henry James about driving in a carriage through here. She thought we might use it.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Greg was looking back at him too. “You feeling sick?”

  “Not that. But there’s something.”

  Ned shifted to the right side of the van and opened the door. He got out. He stood by the side of the road, trying to understand what he was feeling. Traffic was lighter now, an occasional car went past. Greg had the fl
ashers on. The high cliffs on both sides cast the road into shadow. It was chilly. The wind blew from the north. Not a mistral, but not comforting, either. Valley of Hell.

  “You think she’s here?” Greg asked through a rolleddown window.

  Ned shook his head. “No. I think what I’m getting is older, from the past. I think I’m feeling something from back then, not from now.”

  “But not as bad as before, right?” Greg asked.

  Ned looked through the window past his father at Greg, whose face was a lot like Edward Marriner’s now. Fear, and a kind of diffident respect. It was a bit scary to realize it, but they believed him.

  “Not as bad,” he said. “Just the same sense of something still here. The same kind of . . .” He fought for the words. “Breaking through?”

  “You mean from medieval times? The castle at Les Baux?” His father’s forehead was really creased now, Ned saw. The struggle to make sense of this.

  Ned thought about it. He walked away towards the cliff and looked up at it. Then he came back and shook his head again. “Can’t tell. I’m no good at this, but I think it goes further back.” He took another breath. “We’ll ask Kate. Or look it up. But I think we can go on. I don’t feel anything here from, like, now. This is just weird, that’s all.”

  His dad looked as if he was about to disagree, then he sighed and shrugged. “I’m out of my league,” he said.

  Ned got back in and slid the door shut. Greg looked back at him for a second, then put the car in gear and started forward again.

  They passed through that closed-in arid canyon in silence, came out of shadow into springtime fields and vineyards and sunlight again. Moments later they saw the Roman arch and a tower on the left side of the road—right beside it.

  There was another brown sign pointing towards the ruins of Glanum down an angled, tree-lined path on the other side.

  Greg pulled into a gravel parking lot directly in front of the arch. The lot was almost empty. Ned got out. He saw a couple of families spreading an early picnic on the grass beyond. Kids were playing soccer. He felt like an alien watching them, someone from a different world, just intersecting theirs.

  Greg walked over to look at the arch, and the taller, oddly shaped structure beside it. Ned’s father stopped beside him.