Darkhenge (23 page)

Rob was silent. He couldn't answer, so he turned and marched on.

The corridor ended abruptly, becoming a place of slabbed stone. The stones were sarsen and they were cold. They made a rough roof, just high enough for him to stand, and led into dimness; on each side, low openings yawned. The ground was uneven with chalk. His breath smoked; the air was chillingly damp, the stones glistening with faint moisture.

As soon as he saw it, he recognized it.

It was the passage of the long barrow at West Kennet, barely a mile from Darkhenge. For a moment he thought with joy he was out, that he was back in the world, but when he turned he saw the King crouched there, and behind him the paneled corridor with its ruined paintings.

Ducking into the first side chamber, Rob saw bones. They lay in a heap, and he knew this must have been how it was before the tomb was excavated, how the remains of its builders had lain here for millennia, sealed in the earth, because he'd read it umpteen times on the notice outside. Skulls and long bones, sorted neatly in piles.

He and Chloe had played in here. Hide and seek. Jumping out and scaring each other.

He drew back, walked on. Two chambers on each side, and then the last, a corbeled roof, the huge slabs of the rounded sides.

He crept into the burial chamber, alert for her yell in his ear, her weight on his back.

It was empty.

And there was no way out.

“Why should I make a truce with you?” Clare stepped back.

Vetch came up to her and held her arms. “Because if we don't, they'll become as we are. Hating, loving, never forgiving. I know how he'll feel, all his life, if she dies. There will be no way he can make it up to her, the neglect, the way he let his art swallow up his life. I know how that feels.”

She went to pull back but his grip was firm. “So you should,” she whispered.

He smiled.
“‘A hen devoured me. I rested nine nights in her womb, a child. I have been dead. I have been alive. I am Taliesin.'”

Clare looked away. Then, barely heard, she breathed, “For the girl's sake then.”

Chloe had dissolved the wall of the burial chamber and made the slabs slide into place behind her. Now she was deep in the forest; it was dark all around her, and she was getting tired of the dark. So she made the moon rise. It came up like a wobbling silver globe behind the trees. That was good.

And she was tired of walking too. The sixth caer might be miles away. So she whistled.

Through the rustling forest a soft clinking answered, and a thud, deep in leaf drift. A white shape detached itself from darkness, vanished, then reappeared between the tree trunks.

Chloe laughed and ducked under the branches, running down a thread of path out into a clearing, where a white horse looked up from grazing, whinnied, and shook its mane.

She gave a great, screeching whoop of joy.

“Callie! Callie, it's you!”

The King said, “We're trapped.”

“You're a great help.” Rob turned. He looked back up the corridor past the paintings. Then he yelled, “Mac!”

Something rattled and slid.

“MAC! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

If he could, there was no answer. Only a whine. At first it came from the roof, then it grew louder, emanating from the walls, a deafeningly horrible monotone, a grinding flat line of sound that made Rob clamp his hands over his ears in agony. “What is that? What is that?”

The King looked around in despair. “A machine. An alarm.”

Rob stared at him in disbelief. “Chloe's monitors! Oh my God!
She's making them think she's dying!
”

It was Rob. Somewhere close, unmistakable.

“Can you hear me?” he yelled. I was praying, and my eyes jerked wide, but before I could breathe, everything crashed. Breathing, heart rate. We got Katie out, sobbing, screaming. Nurses ran in, carrying pieces of equipment, shoving me back.

I feel heavy and clumsy and useless.

She isn't breathing, she isn't warm. Her face is white and tiny.

The line on the monitor is as flat as despair.

They've turned off the alarm, but the silence is worse, and Katie is staring at Rosa, over John's shoulder, knowing their little girl is slipping away.

“Who are all these people, Mac?” she sobs.

There is nothing in which I have not existed.

“T
HE
B
ATTLE OF THE
T
REES
”

R
ob spread his hands against the stones and leaned his forehead on them. “She can't have walked through it.”

“Yes she can.” The King sat wearily by the puddles on the chalky floor. “To her, this is something to be manipulated. She lives in a world now where everything can be as she wants. Have you any idea how intoxicating that must be?”

Rob didn't want to think. Since the alarm had snapped off, the silence had been too terrifying. “What about us?”

“We're trapped. Unless, of course, there's something in the druid's bag you can use.”

Rob hesitated. Then he pulled the bag from around his neck and opened it, turned it upside down, and shook it.

Nothing.

Baffled, he groped inside. “It's empty! But it was full of stuff. It was heavy!”

The King seemed amused under his mask. “Perhaps the poet keeps his secrets better than we think.”

Rob glared. A drip of water fell from the slabbed roof onto his neck, making him jump. Then he said, “What did Clare mean, that it was once a woman's skin?”

The King nodded. “Oh yes, that's true. Her name was Aoife. A sorceress named Iuchra wanted her husband, so she asked Aoife to come swimming with her and then turned her into a crane. The bird flew to the house of the sea lord Manannan, where she lived for two hundred years. And when she died he made a bag from her skin, and in it he placed his treasures. This he gave to the poet.”

“Vetch?”

“All poets. Any poet.” The King picked it up curiously. “They say that when the tide is full, so is the bag, and when the tide is out the bag is empty.”

Rob slammed his hand against the stone. “Great!”

“But in fact it is not quite empty now.” The King held it up to him. “Listen.”

Taking the soft leather, Rob put his ear to it, half afraid something might come out. At first he heard only the creaking of the leather, and then an undertone of sound, a murmuring. “What is it?”

“Words,” the King said. “The bag is full of words.”

They were in all languages. Loud, angry arguments and quiet pleadings, complex explanations and simple prayers. Words that twisted and manipulated and berated and demanded. And through the babble and behind it, there was a music of syllables, as if all the poetry of the world and the Unworld was being recited together, a rosary of crafted sound, each vowel and consonant clear, itself, as individual as the trees in the wood. As if the bag contained a work that never ended, that would go on until something impossible was made, an existence was formed. He found himself thinking of Mac's voice, reading the Christmas gospel among the candles at mass.
In the beginning was the Word.

He lowered it slowly. “I'm an artist. I don't know about words.”

“But the poet isn't here, and we must do what we can.” The King stood. “I would suggest you put your hand in, take a handful of sound and meaning, and lift it out.”

Feeling lost, Rob put his hand in. There was nothing to lift but he lifted it out, and as it came he felt it slither in his fingers, harden, twist, clatter onto the chalky floor. Briefly the things were ogham sticks, but as they touched the soil they became a cascade of antlers, flint knives, the wide shoulder blades of cattle.

The King groaned and picked one up. “Antler picks. Used to build this tomb, millennia ago.”

Rob lifted another and tested it against his palm. The tines were sharp, the grip smooth, as if many hands had honed it. He looked up at the stones of the corbeled roof. “Then we'd better use them too,” he said.

It was brilliant to be riding again. She could only gallop if she made the trees stand aside, and that wasn't easy. The trees resisted, they didn't want to do it; they closed up tight again behind her. But for a few moments she let Callie run across the cropped turf of a hill slope, the moon high and full overhead. It was like the downs at night, and there were moths and bats and an owl that flew from tree to tree, and in some places where the ground was low were fireflies, their tiny glimmers lost among bracken and heather.

But keeping the trees away was a strain, and when she forgot, they closed in again, and it was too tiring to stop them. They seemed to be guiding her, forming a long avenue with smooth grass down the center, so that she rode the way they wanted her to ride, always downhill, the wind dying away and a midnight stillness falling on the land.

The sixth caer must lie ahead. She knew that each circle led farther in, and yet each was larger, the forest within it denser. And the wood was not so empty now; creatures were stirring in it. She had heard wolves, and a boar had grunted in a thicket as she passed, its bowed back spined. But that didn't worry her. Why should it? She was Queen of the Unworld.

Rob was far behind. She didn't want to think about him. Clare must have dealt with Vetch. Neither of them would be seriously hurt, surely. And yet she tugged on the reins and drew Callie to a walk, glancing back down the eerie avenue of trees.

Then the enormity of what she had ordered the King to do swept over her like a cold dread. She imagined Rob's terror as the knife slashed the vines, his scream as he fell.

She stopped the horse.

What was happening to her? She put both hands up to her face, felt her cheekbones and eyes, the reins slipping so that Callie cropped the dark grass.

Rob.

She'd always looked up to him. He was older, had always been there, in school, holding her hand on her first day. She remembered how cross she'd been when she realized she'd always be younger, that she'd never catch up with him. How Mum always cut him a bigger slice of cake, because he was a boy.

Stupid things to be jealous of.

But you couldn't kill someone in a world that didn't exist.

Could you?

She looked back.

Maybe she should go home. Vetch would know how. And Mac was back there. If she found the Chair in the seventh caer, she would never see Mac again, or Mum or Dad, or the girls at school. Or even Tom Whelan. For a moment anguish filled her up; then the trees rustled in the Unworld breeze, and all their faces faded.

They seemed distant, unreal. Perhaps she had only ever been asleep and dreamed them. Perhaps there was no world out there.

The harness chinked. Callie blew through her nostrils, dipped her head.

Chloe patted her neck and leaned down, rubbing the familiar white coat. “Don't worry. It won't be far now.”

If she was Queen, surely she could make the sixth caer come to her.

But when she lifted her head, she saw it at the end of the avenue.

Spun from tree to tree, like a web.

“It's coming! Look out!”

The stone tipped. A shower of soil fell onto Rob's upturned face; he coughed, shook it away, his arms straining up. Heavy on his shoulders, the King's weight made him stagger; the man's fingers dug into the widening crack, forcing the pick in, working it up and down.

Fine gravel crumbled; then with a crack the stone gave. The King hauled it out and tossed it down; he shoved the antler into the gap and pushed, ramming it upward until it went through so suddenly he lurched, and Rob had to stagger sideways to hold him steady.

“We're out!”

Cold wind gusted in.

The hole was tiny; the King's shape filled it. He worked fiercely, tearing down stones and rubble, and Rob gripped his legs and grimaced at the pain in his chest and thought about Clare, how furious she would be at the damage. This was an ancient monument, after all.

But then this was the Unworld, and nothing was the same.

“I can get through now. Push me up.”

As the King scrambled and swore and shoved his boots into his face, Rob's worry about Vetch resurfaced. The poet was no longer ill or frail; the Unworld had strengthened him, but it had transformed Clare too, and she was ruthless. What was happening to them?

The King's weight jerked and mercifully lightened; with a sudden slither he was through the hole. After a moment he leaned back through, reaching down. “Right. Pass the bag up first.”

“No chance.” Rob slipped the strap around his neck. He piled the fallen stones together and climbed, wobbling, onto the heap, squeezing head and shoulders into the gap. The King's voice was rueful. “Suit yourself.”

It took an age to get out, being pulled and scrabbling and hauling himself up by his arms, and when he had finally climbed onto the roof of the ruined barrow, he was exhausted, and wanted only to lie on the dark leaf drift and rest.