Candlenight (65 page)

   
As a wind blew out of nowhere,
she forced Bethan down the river bank to the edge of the water. Bethan looked
up. Even without her glasses she could see the church tower had lost its grip
on the moon, which seemed to be swimming away on a churning sea of cloud.

   
"Look, Buddug! Look at the
sky!"

   
"It will pass," Buddug
said. The wind had seized her ragged hair, making it writhe like serpents. She
was the
Gwrach y rhibyn.
The death
hag. She pulled Bethan into the shelter of the bridge. "I will tell you
how it was," she hissed into Bethan's face, with a gush of vile breath.

   
"No!"

   
"We all came to see. A
beautiful summer night, it was, the sun going down. And you in your white
summer dress. Like a bride."

   
"And my husband already
dying." Bethan tried to turn her head away and Buddug seized her cheeks
between thumb and forefinger.

   
"Indeed, perhaps that was
the very night he began to die," Buddug said, the muscular fingers of her
other hand caressing the bruised skin on Bethan's neck with dreadful tenderness.

   
"No . . ." Bethan closed
her eyes, felt and smelled Buddug's warm, putrid breath, began to cough.

   
"You closed them that night,
too . . ." Bethan jerked both eyes open, looking into Buddug's yellow
teeth, the black gaps between them, the breath pumped through those
gaps like poison gas.

   
"You did not care,"
Buddug said dreamily. "You were in thrall to the night and the sweet
smells and the old magic. And as you lay with your legs spread . . ." A
heavy gust of wind came through the bridge, with a surge of snow.

   
"
Gwrach
! Bethan screamed through the wind. "
Gwrach! Gwrach! Gwrach!"

   
Buddug had both her butcher's
hands around Bethan's throat now, holding her at arm's length and looking from side
to side, down at the river then up at the church and the heaving sky, with the
sudden realisation that something fundamental had altered. "What have you
done, bitch? What have you done to the night?"

   
"
Gwrach!"

   
"You are . . .
cachu
." Buddug's eyes burning red
like coals.

   
Bethan felt a thumb going up
into her larynx, its nail probing like a knife. She felt the skin parting, her
throat constricting, tongue out, eyes popping.

   
"And when I can see in your
eyes that your time is upon you," Buddug told her, "I shall tell to
you the name of the father of your child."

Bethan felt herself rising above the horror of the night and the hag's
slaughterhouse hands and graveyard breath. Rising into the Wales of her
childhood, low tide at Ynyslas, a fire of driftwood on her birthday, the view
from Constitution Hill at sunset over the last ice lolly of the day. She heard
lines of poetry: Gwenallt, Dic Jones the bard and finally, sonorously, in
English, the haunted cleric, R. S. Thomas:

         
to
live in Wales is to be conscious

         
At
dusk of the spilled blood

         
That
went to the making of the wild sky

   
Between the snowflakes, she
felt the hot splashes of blood on her face, opening her eyes at the deafening
blast, Buddug's hands still around her throat but no grip in them any more.

   
And Buddug, no head to speak of
most of it in fragments down the front of Bethan's torn once-white raincoat.

NOS DA

Chapter LXXV

The other side of midnight people began to emerge from their homes in
coats and scarves, carrying lamps and torches, all very muted, hardly saying a
word to each other. Like survivors of some bombing raid, Mair Huws, from the
Post Office, and Eirlys Hywels silently helped Bethan take off what remained of
the raincoat and wrapped her in an old tapestry cape, leaving the bloody mac
draped over the bridge, dripping into the river.

   
Aled was crouching alone just
inside the alley between the inn and the sub-station where the wind could not
reach him. By the light of his torch, propped up against a brick, he was
slipping another cartridge into his shotgun.

   
"What are you looking
at?" He stood up and pointed the twelve-bore vaguely around him. In fact,
nobody was looking at him except Berry Morelli, smoking a cigarette, one sleeve
of his flying jacket flapping empty.

   
"Well, Aled. What can I
say? You blew her head off. Dump the gun now?"

   
Aled shook his head. "To
the rectory I have to go."

   
"Hey now, Aled,"
Berry said. "Think about this. Just take—"

   
"What is there to think
about?" Standing with the gun hanging loose in his limp hands, white hair
bedraggled. Aled put on a stark smile. "Mass-murderer I am now, isn't
it?"

   
"When we explain to the
cops—" Berry said, but Aled shook his head.

   
"Explain. Explain
this?" He chuckled sourly. "Where do you begin? No, what I am doing
is giving you an easy explanation, isn't it?"

   
Berry said,
"Grief-stricken madman goes on the rampage with shotgun."

   
Aled smiled ruefully. "You
are a little ahead of me, boy."
   
Berry looked at the little white-haired
mass-killer and saw some kind of flawed hero.

   
"Go on, you bugger,"
Aled said. "Leave me be. Go to your woman."

   
"Why'd you do all this,
Aled? There's nothing gonna bring her back."

   
Aled said. "Listen man, an
accident. I have no reason to think otherwise. I blame no one for that.
I—" He patted his jacket pocket, spare cartridges rattled. "I don't
want the third degree, Morelli. Don't know why I turned away. Been coming on a
long time probably."

   
"One more question,
OK?"

   
Aled sighed. "I ought to
shoot you as well, you nosy bugger."

   
"The tomb. Unless Glyndwr
had curly horns—"
   
"Morelli, it never mattered what
was in that tomb. The
Gorsedd Ddu
has
always
looked after this place, long
before Glyndwr.
Y Groesfan
, the
crossing place, where the warriors and heroes and the men of magic came to die.
People have lived here half-aware of this for centuries. What they brought
back, the four, was—I don't know—the spirit of Glyndwr, isn't it? Or something.
How do you say it in English—the essence?"

   
Which they corrupted, Berry
thought. They took the magic, and they wove that into the tapestry of this
place. He thought of what he and Bethan had learned in the library over at
Hereford yesterday. The impression they'd formed of the latter Druids as
purveyors of a degraded version of the Celtic religion.

   
This
was the tradition continued by the
Gorsedd Ddu.

   
"Can of worms," Berry
said, thinking of graveyard worms, grown fat on the dead. "How could folks
live with all that?"

   
"Ah, Morelli, you will
never understand. It's powerful, see. It works. What else in Wales is truly
powerful these days, other than our traditions?" Aled's top teeth vanished
into his snowy moustache. "Excuse me, I am going to take the air."

   
"No way I can talk you out
of this?"

   
"Not unless you have a
bigger gun," Aled said. Berry watched him walk away across the bridge into
the snow.

   
He discovered Bethan was at his
elbow, wrapped in some kind of Welsh rug.

   
"He's gone to kill ap
Siencyn." Berry said. "I don't see him coming back."

   
She gripped his only visible
arm.

   
"No," Berry said.
"He knows where he's at. I think."

   
"Just goes on, doesn't
it?" Her voice was hoarse and fractured; she kept massaging her throat.
"On and on."

   
"Something ended here
tonight. You must feel that."

   
"Nothing truly ends with
guns," Bethan said.

   
Berry shrugged, which hurt his
broken arm. "How do you feel now?"

   
"How do I look?"

   
Bruises besmirched most of her
face. The skin was purple and swollen around both eyes. Her lip was twisted and
her cheeks blotched with blood, some of it her own.

   
"You look wonderful,"
he said.

   
"Your poor arm. Is it very
painful?"

   
"Not like in the church.
Christ, I don't think I ever felt more—you know—than when I was lying with both
arms jammed in the Goddam tomb and there's this candle drifting towards me
across—"

   
Bethan looked up sharply.

   
"Don't panic," Berry
said. "It was Aled. The dissident. His, ah, wife died."
   
"Gwenllian?"

   
"Accident in Aber. What
pushed him over the edge, I guess. Sign that when something goes real bad, it
ceases to discriminate between the English and the Welsh."

   
"Or traitors and the
cowards," Bethan said.

   
"I liked him. Whatever
happened here tonight, whatever lifted, it was in some way all down to him. Not
me or you.
He
did it."

   
He licked his forefinger and
rubbed a blood-fleck off her nose. "What happens in the church, Aled puts
down the candle and he levers up the slab so I can get my arms out and then we
kick the slab clean off the tomb and smash the shit outta the fucking effigy.
He does most of that, I'm hurting too much."

   
Bethan said slowly. "So
you know now what was in the tomb."

   
"Yeah."

   
"Do I have to ask?"

   
"Bones," Berry said.
"Bones. Like you'd expect. Only not what you'd expect. Soon as the air got
inside they more or less crumbled away. But. yeah, we saw what it was."

   
"And?"

   
"Aled figured it for a
ram."
   
"A ram? As in . . . sheep?"
   
"Yeah. Make what you want outta
that. Me, I don't want to think too hard about it. I lost enough sleep
already."

   
The rotors of the police
helicopter were heard, a distant drone and then a clatter. And with the clatter
a searchlight beam swept the village.

   
"Best place to land, I
think." Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones said, "is the school
playground. What do you think, Neil?"

   
Sergeant Neil Probert only
grunted. Flying at night through intermittent snow, he'd been terrified most of
the way. Even the pilot did not look exactly happy. He'd made them wait an hour
until the snow had eased, before deciding it was safe to make the trip at all.

   
Neil had not spoken since the
searchlight had picked up the Daihatsu on its side at the bottom of a gulley,
and Gwyn Arthur had ordered the pilot to go in low enough to ascertain that
they were both dead, the two men who'd been flung out into the snow. They could
not have been anything but dead.

   
"Tell you one thing,
Guv," said the pilot now. a Cockney called Bob Gomer. "You won't
catch me doing this number again."

   
"Ah, worst of it is over,
man," Gwyn Arthur said, scornfully. "Right now, come on, let's go
round the village once again before we land."

   
There was still apparently no
power in Y Groes. Plenty of little glimmerings, though, candles, lamps. Far
more than you'd expect after midnight even in a town the size of Pont.
Something was up, Gwyn Arthur thought. No question.

   
The police helicopter circled
over the pub—lots of wispy little lights around there—and then over the church
and back again towards the river.

   
"OK, take her in then,
Bob. No wait—what's that?" Gwyn Arthur leaned forward in his seat.

   
Neil Probert, feeling queasy,
didn't move, just closed his eyes and muttered. "Where?"