Ysabel (20 page)

To Ned, he murmured, “I will go up when he comes. They will not be expecting me. He believes he has led me astray. All of them will be intent upon me. Go back along this field to where you came in, then
run
down the path. You will find your afternoon light again, beyond the gate.”

Ned looked at him. “What will you do?”

Another shake of the head. “Accept my gratitude and your lives. Leave quickly when I go up.”

In that stillness, wind blowing under moonlight, they heard a sound from the sanctuary ahead of them. Ned lifted his head. He gasped. The figures were visible now.

And more than that: the walls of the guard tower were back.

They were up, had risen again, as if they’d never been brought down, never known catapults.

The figures on the street in front of it had their backs to that tower. They were looking back along the path they’d just taken. Ned saw that they were dressed the way the man by the tower two nights ago had been, in variously coloured tunics, bright leggings, boots or sandals. Swords.

Swords?

These were Celts, Ned realized. And that meant they, and the risen tower, were over two thousand years old.
Oh God
, he thought again.

He wished he were home.
All
the way home.

And then he realized another strangeness, on top of all the others. He blinked, looked again. There was only moonlight, smoky torches, and yet . . .

He said softly, “Why can I see them so well? Even colours? Before, I couldn’t at all. Now it’s . . . too clear up there.”

The man on his left said nothing for a moment, then he murmured, “You are inside the night yourself. In your own way. Be very careful, Ned Marriner.”

“How do I do that?” Ned asked.

“By leaving. It matters. Beltaine can change you.”

Whatever that meant.

The man looked away from them. When he spoke again his voice had changed again. “But see. See now. Here is the bright companion of all my days.”

This, too, Ned Marriner would remember. The words, and how they were spoken.

He looked towards the entrance to the site.

Someone else was coming along the path.

No horns on his head this time, but Ned knew him instantly. Not a figure you forgot: tall, broad-shouldered, long-striding, the long, bright hair, same heavy golden torc about his neck. What seemed to be a sword at his side. He didn’t remember a blade before. The others by the sanctuary were watching him approach, their torches high, waiting.

The man beside Ned whispered, “See how fair he is, the tall one, how brilliant . . .” Ned could feel him tremble. “I will leave you,” the man said.

“You have no weapon,” Ned whispered.

“They will give me one,” he heard. “Remember, along this meadow, down the path, away.”

“You said you weren’t a good man,” Kate Wenger said, almost accusingly.

“Oh, believe me,” he whispered, staring straight ahead, not even looking at them now, “I told you truth.”

Ned glanced at him. And, just as in the cloister, something was inside his head abruptly: a thought, whole and complete, something he should have had no way of knowing.

He heard himself say, before he could stop, “Were you at the mountain? Way back then? Sainte-Victoire?”

The man in the grey leather jacket shifted, as if being pulled from where he wanted to be. He gazed at Ned in the darkness for a long moment.

“It really would interest me,” he said finally, “had we leisure enough, to learn who you are.”

“I’m right? Aren’t I? You
were
there?”

Ned could hear him breathing in the night. “We all were,” the man said. “She was mine that time.” He added something in a language Ned didn’t know. And then he said, “Go when I go up. What will follow, you should not see.”

He moved forward, low to the ground. Ned thought he was going to stand and walk up the slope right then, but he didn’t. He stopped behind another, nearer tree.

Ned had a sense the man was feeling something too fierce, too charged with intensity, to have stayed beside them, with their questions and chatter and guesses:
Why is it dark? What’s his name?

He’d been patient. He was trying to save their lives. But now he needed to ready himself for what was coming.

Kate sighed suddenly beside Ned and slipped her left hand into his right, lacing fingers again.

They will kill you tonight.
How did you react so much to the touch of a girl when you’d just heard that? Maybe, Ned thought, maybe such opposing feelings—fear, and the scent and feel of the girl beside him—
could somehow go together, not be opposed after all. It was a difficult idea.

He looked up towards the site and the square, risen tower. The tall man had reached the sanctuary and those waiting there. He looked golden, godlike.

The others didn’t bow, but they made a space for him in the wide street. His hair was unbound, lying on his shoulders. It was an axe at his belt, Ned realized, not a sword. Jewellery glinted on his arms and around his throat. A smaller, older man stood beside him, dressed in white.

“Wow,” breathed Kate. “He’s gorgeous!”

She didn’t mean the little guy in white. A flicker of jealousy went through Ned, but her words were no less than truth, he thought.

There was a sense of waiting, of anticipation, on the plateau ahead of them, even now that this bright figure had come. They were all turned to the north, towards the torches planted on either side of the path. And because he was looking that way, as they were, across the low, long-levelled ruins, Ned saw when the white bull entered Entremont.

He felt, again, as if the world as he had always understood it was changing moment by moment, even as he lay hidden in the grass.

He saw that the animal was being led forward on a rope by three men through the moonlight of Beltaine eve. The bull was enormous, but it was also docile, moving quietly.

The torches were on stakes planted in pairs in the
ground, and the bull—massive, otherworldly—passed between those fires. Ned somehow knew that there was a meaning to this going back so far he was afraid to think about it.

“Another bull,” whispered Kate.

Ned shook his head. “Not another. This is the one the others were about.”

The moon was shining and full and in that light the animal seemed to gleam and shimmer. Beside him, Kate was watching it in the same way Ned was, with awe and fear—and pity.

“They’re going to kill it,” she breathed.

“Yes,” he said.

He saw the golden figure unhook the axe from his belt. A sound came from the figures around him.

This was a sacrifice, Ned understood. What else could it be? Tonight was the beginning of summer’s season, hinge of the year in the days when these people and those who preceded and followed them—here and elsewhere—shaped their rites of goddess and god, fertility and death.

Here and elsewhere,
Ned thought. Wales, too. His own people, his mother’s. His grandmother’s.

They would have to go quickly as soon as the man in front of them went up. Ned wasn’t sure why he believed he could do that—just walk up—but what could Ned properly understand about this, anyhow?

He knew some things, but he didn’t know
how
he knew them, and it didn’t seem to be helping with anything that mattered. Once they got out,
if
they
got out, it would matter less. Wouldn’t it? It would be over.

“Hot-and-sour soup,” he muttered.

In reply, Kate Wenger giggled, amazingly. Then, after a pause, she moved their linked hands up to her mouth and bit his knuckle. Ned’s heart thumped, for different reasons than before.

“Behave, you,” she said softly.

“Me?” he murmured, genuinely startled—and aroused.

But in that same moment he
did
have a new thought, and felt a hard kick of fear. Something slid into place: he was pretty sure he finally knew what was going on with Kate.

He was about to say it, but stopped himself. What was the point? He couldn’t
do
anything about it. They just had to get out, for one more reason now, if he was right.

The three men leading the bull had now reached the one with the axe. They stopped in front of him. The white bull stopped. The smaller man in white stood to one side, holding something. There was silence.

Then Ned saw all the figures gathered there bow to the animal, as they had not bowed to the man.

The broad-shouldered figure spoke then, for the first time. Ned remembered that voice from two nights ago, rich and musical, deep as a drum. He said half a dozen words—Ned couldn’t understand them—and when he paused, those around him, fifty of them at least, gave a response.

The man spoke, and then they did. The wind blew. Smoke streamed from torches held and those embedded in the ground.

The bull, eerily white in the moonlight, stood placidly, as if entranced by the chanting voices. It might be that, Ned thought. Or else they’d given it some drug.

The voices stopped.

“I can’t watch,” Kate whispered suddenly, and she turned her face against Ned’s shoulder.

The man with the axe lifted it so that the weapon, too, glinted under that moon. And then, with a shout of joy, he brought it sweeping, scything, crashing down to strike the bull, overwhelmingly, between the great horns.

Ned felt Kate crying (only now, for the first time, for the animal). He forced himself to keep watching as the stricken, bludgeoned creature collapsed to its forelegs, and blood—strangely hued in the moon-silver night—burst forth, soaking all those close to it.

Barbaric
, Ned wanted to say, think, feel, but something stopped him.

The man in the white robe stepped quickly forward holding a bowl to the spurting wound, filling it with blood. With both hands he extended it towards the one with the axe, the man Ned had last seen in the shape of an owl flying from a different ruined tower.

The big man let fall his bloodied axe. He claimed the bowl with two hands. Ned felt his pulse racing furiously, as if he were sprinting flat out towards some cliff he couldn’t see.

The man raised the bowl in front of him, the way he’d lifted the axe a moment before. As he spoke, words of incantation, the white bull toppled to one side at his feet like some great structure falling, blood still flowing, soaking into the dusty ground. No one answered the words this time.

Beside the tree in front of Ned and Kate, a lean, scarred man stood up. He said something under his breath. It might have been a prayer.

In front of the sanctuary, the raised bowl was lowered by the golden man. He drank the blood.

“Oh, my!” said Kate Wenger suddenly, too loudly.

She lifted her head.

“I can’t . . . I . . . What’s happening?”

Her voice was
really
strange. She jerked her hand from Ned’s, shifted away from him.

Ned stared at her. The man by the tree had heard. He looked back at them. Kate got to her knees, made as if to stand. Terrified, Ned pulled her back down.

“Kate!” he hissed.
“What are you doing?”

She tried to pull away. “Don’t! I need . . . I have to . . .”

“No,” he heard the man just ahead of them breathe. “Not this one! She is too young. This should not be—”

Kate Wenger was writhing and twisting beside Ned, fighting to get away. She kicked him. Breathing in shallow gasps, she scratched his arm, then hit him in the chest with both fists.

And just then, in that same, precise moment, up on the plateau of Entremont under a full moon in a
darkness that belonged only to this time between times when the walls were down, another voice was heard from the entrance to the site, beyond the paired torches burning beside the path.

“Ned?
Ned?
Are you here? Come on, I’ve brought the van!”

With his heart aching, and the first horrified glimmer of understanding coming to him, Ned saw Melanie—small and clever and fearless, with the green streak in her hair—take a hesitant step forward between the smoking torches, the way the bull had.

In that instant, Kate Wenger went limp beside him.

She collapsed as if released from a puppet-string, from a force that had been pulling, drawing,
demanding
her.

Several things happened at once.

The scarred man looked at the two of them a last time, then turned back to the ruins. As if he, too, was being pulled that way. And of course he was, Ned later realized: pulled by centuries.

And by love.

Ned saw him take a step himself and then another, up the small slope, and there he stopped, still unobserved, watching Melanie. Staring at her. He was completely exposed now, up on the plateau. He would have been spotted if any one of those gathered by the sanctuary had looked his way.

They didn’t. The big man with the fair hair handed the bowl back to the one in white without even glancing at him. He stood very still, head high, hands empty
at his sides, facing Melanie where she stood on the north-south path. They were
all
watching her, Ned saw.

She began to come forward, slowly, between fires.

Ned shifted to his knees so he could see better. He kept one hand on Kate’s shoulder where she lay, face to the dark grass. But his eyes were on Melanie, along with everyone else’s.

So he saw when she began to
stop
being Melanie.

She came along the straight roadway, past the low, ruined walls of ancient houses, towards the sanctuary and the figures waiting there, walking between nine pairs of torches. Ned counted them as she went. Each time she disappeared and reappeared through the smoke, she had changed.

The first time, Ned actually rubbed his eyes, like a child. After that, he didn’t do it again, he just watched. With his unnaturally keen sight here, he saw when her hair began to change in that moonlight towards red, and then when it
was
red, and falling so much longer than before. And he thought, for the first time, how inadequate the words for colours could sometimes be.

Her clothing began to alter. Halfway down the row she was wearing sandals, not boots, and a calf-length, onepiece garment, with a heavy gold belt. He saw her come through another pair of flames with golden bracelets on her arms, and rings on several fingers. She was tall by then.