Darkhenge

by Catherine Fisher

  The dark-haired man came up and stopped. “I told them you’d be back.”

  Rosa gave him a bottle of water; he opened it and drank gratefully, looking up at the crest of the downs. “I’ve always loved this place,” he said quietly. “It’s very good to be ending things here.”

  “Listen.” Rob was uneasy. “What does Darkhenge mean?”

  Vetch drank again. Then he stoppered the bottle deliberately. “I think you already know that, Rob. What’s more, I think you’ve seen it.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Vetch looked up at him quickly, eyes dark. “It’s down there in the valley, isn’t it? Near the river. I can feel it emerging. I can feel it coming back out of the earth.”

  The two girls were listening intently. Rosa said, “The whole group ought to hear this.”

  Vetch nodded. “Agreed. But does Rob want to come?”

  He shrugged. He did and he didn’t. If Dan saw him with this crowd he’d never hear the end of it.

  “Shall we go?” Vetch gestured at the car. He had long, rather delicate fingers.

  Rob stood his ground. “How did you know I’d seen it?”

  Vetch came past him and opened the car door. He sat wearily on the hot leather seat, propped one foot up on the dashboard, and drank again, smiling out at the fields of barley.

  “A little bird told me,” he said quietly.

  The

  Crane-skin

  Bag

  U. UATH: HAWTHORN

  We traveled all night, through the forest. The carriage bounced along rough tracks. The forest was dark and the trees crowded close, and far back there was some sort of murmur, as if the wind blew, but not here.

  I got the feeling he wanted to apologize, but he never spoke. He kept looking back, over his shoulder.

  Then there were lanterns in the trees. “This is it,” he said. “The second caer. You’ll be safe here, Chloe.”

  I wish he’d take that silly mask off.

  Terrible the anger of the goddess who pursued me.

  THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

  They drove down to Avebury in silence, apart from the drifty music, then turned up Green Street through the great opening in the bank and pulled in under the trees. The lane was quiet and leafy. As Rob had expected, a few tents were pitched in the copse, the smell of a fire acrid in the heat.

  “Are you all camping out here?”

  Rosa laughed. “Most of us like a little more comfort. I’m in a B and B. Some have camper vans and things.”

  He looked at Vetch. “What about you?”

  The man smiled his enigmatic smile. “Never mind. Come and tell us about the henge.”

  There was hot coffee; it smelled rich and tasted better. When Rosa had got everyone together, they all sat around drinking and looking curiously at Rob. He had a desperate desire to make an excuse and go, had just summoned enough courage to do it when Vetch held up a hand for silence.

  When they could hear the breeze in the leaves above them he said, “Rob has seen Darkhenge. Tell the group about it, Rob.”

  He frowned. “It’s supposed to be secret.”

  “Not from us. We already know.” Vetch had taken the small skin bag from around his neck and placed it beside him. His coat, Rob noticed, was worn and frayed at the sleeves.

  The group waited, expectant. So he shrugged and breathed out and said, “There’s a circle, and it’s made of wood. Ancient timbers. They’re all really excited about it. They haven’t excavated very far down yet, so you can only see the tops of the posts. I don’t know how far down it goes.” He looked up. “Is that what you mean by Darkhenge?”

  Vetch smiled, but didn’t answer. One of the men said, “A timber henge? Intact? That’s incredible.”

  “It’s a freak, the woman told me. Trapped layers of water have preserved it. I told you, they can’t believe it themselves. The woman in charge is called Dr. Kavanagh—”

  He stopped. Beside him Vetch had taken a small, sharp breath. “Clare Kavanagh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know her?” Rosa asked.

  Vetch scratched his cheek ruefully. “Once I knew her.”

  “She’s ferocious. If she thought I was telling you—”

  “Don’t worry, Rob.” Rosa tapped his shoulder. “There’s no one here who’ll say it was you. You have no connection with us.”

  “Unless someone sees me.”

  “How long will it take?” One of the men, Tom, was looking at Vetch. “For them to dig it out?”

  The poet shrugged. “One, two weeks. The timbers will need to be kept wet; they’ll have to work quickly. Clare won’t waste time. It will be cleared, and then … removed.”

  “Removed?” Rosa looked appalled. Vetch glanced at her, his star-shaped scar bright in the sun. “I’m afraid so. Archaeology, in the end, is destruction. To discover what the henge is, to find its date, the way it was made, they will break it down. Once open to the air it will rot, so they’ll feel they must preserve it. The timbers will be hauled out and taken to some tank somewhere and treated. You know that’s what happens.”

  “They should leave it where it is,” Tom growled. “Where it belongs.”

  Vetch spread his fine hands. “Indeed, it would do them more good. Because the things they will learn are useless things. What does a date mean? Time circulates in our minds, nowhere else. The purpose of the henge lies in the place it is and the thing it is. The henge is a gateway. It can’t be unlocked with spades.”

  “And you know all about it?” Rob said quietly.

  Vetch looked up at him, and the smile had gone. “Oh yes. I know.”

  In the silence that followed Megan said, “No wonder they want it kept quiet. There’d be media frenzy, in Avebury of all places. It’s crawling with all sorts of New Age groups, neopagans, local activists, dowsers....”

  Rob closed his eyes in dismay. “There goes the job. I was just getting to enjoy it.”

  “But you don’t need it. Or so you said.” Vetch’s voice was quiet.

  Rob opened his eyes and looked at him in alarm. “How do you know what I said or didn’t say?” It was to Dan he’d said that. Before he’d ever seen Vetch.

  “Because I’ve drunk from the Cauldron, Rob, and nothing is hidden from my sight.” Vetch opened the bag slowly. “I have eaten the hazels of wisdom. Talking of which…” He drew out a handful of small nuts—hazel, Rob thought, with the leaves still on—placed them on the ground and said, “Help yourselves.”

  Two or three of the group looked at one another. Hands stretched out. Rob said, “I should be going.”

  Vetch popped one of the nuts in his mouth and chewed. He was leaning against the trunk of a tree; its branches made a cool green shadow on his face and eyes.

  “First, I need a favor from you. I want to see the henge, Rob.”

  “No way—”

  “Just to see it. You can tell me where it is but I assume there are security precautions.”

  “A fence,” he said reluctantly.

  “Electrified?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Two of them sleep there, in a van. Marcus and Jimmy. Jimmy’s got a dog.” He shook his head, suddenly annoyed. “The fence is locked and I haven’t got a key. If you want to go there, go on your own. Leave me out of it.” He stood up, aware all at once that time had passed, that the heat of the day was cooling. Vetch watched him, his eyes shadowed and calm.

  “And is it only the bird, so far, that has emerged?”

  Rob swallowed.

  Amused, Vetch laughed; Rob sat again, slowly. Then he said, “That bird. How did it happen? I saw it come out of the earth, alive. No species I’ve ever seen.” He shook his head. “Things are happening… I need to ask you … someone…”

  “I know.” Vetch glanced around. “You see, everyone. It begins, as I said it would.”

  “Where did the bird come from?”

  “From Annwn.”


  The word meant something to the group; nothing to Rob. “Where’s that?”

  But Vetch glanced at Rosa. Instead of answering he said, “I think Rosa has a question to ask you.”

  Startled, she stared at him. “Master—”

  “I told you, you must call me Vetch,” he said softly. “Ask the boy. It’s troubling you.”

  Rosa frowned. She rubbed her nose and sighed. Then she said, “I’m sorry, Rob, but he’s right. Who is Chloe?”

  “What?”

  “When I asked you to choose a word, you chose that one. Chloe.”

  “She’s my sister,” he said shortly. He scrambled up, angry now, knowing they had pierced an invisible wall he kept around himself. It was Vetch he was angry with, Vetch who looked at him with that infuriating dark look, who never answered his questions except with others. “Why not ask him?” he snapped. “Your druid … he’s the one who claims to know bloody everything.”

  It was so silent he could hear a bird wheezing out three notes of a song high in the windy hawthorn.

  Vetch stood up. He stepped past the guttering fire and the sprawled listeners and came up to Rob, his eyes steady. Rob stepped back. He did it without thinking, and that made him angrier. But before he could swing away Vetch had put his hand out, his narrow, long hand, and had touched him lightly on the chest.

  Rob didn’t move.

  “One of the poet’s gifts is the imbas forosnai,” Vetch said softly. “The drawing out of knowledge. For instance, I know now where you live; that your mother is an actress and your father the stage manager of a small theater in Oxford. I know that you see the world in colors and shapes as an artist sees it. I know that Chloe is indeed your sister, or she was, because three months ago she fell from her horse at Falkner’s Circle.”

  Behind him the group was silent, stiff, as if with embarrassment or wonder. “And since then,” Vetch murmured, his voice husky, “she has lain between waking and sleeping, between life and death. She has fallen into Annwn. The Unworld.”

  Rob pulled away. The trees were crackling. An electric tingle seemed to be crawling all over his nerves and scalp. Vetch stepped after him, close up. “And I know how that makes you feel, all your weary hours, your dreams, the long silences in the house, the unspoken grief like a weight no one can take from you.”

  They looked at each other. “No,” Rob said tightly. “No you don’t.”

  Tension was brittle. Then Vetch smiled his slow smile. “Maybe not.”

  Instantly, like an invisible wave, weariness seemed to come over him; he almost staggered, and Rob’s hand shot out automatically.

  Rosa leaped up. “Master…”

  “I’m fine.” He rubbed his face wearily. “Thank you, Rosa.” Then he looked up. “Tomorrow night we’ll come. At midnight. It will be easier if you can get hold of the key to this fence.”

  “I can’t.”

  Vetch nodded. “Be careful of Clare Kavanagh. She’s full of anger. And ambition.”

  He turned and went and sat down by Rosa.

  Helpless, Rob stared at them all. “There is no way,” he said fiercely, “that I’m getting any key.”

  Vetch took a hazelnut and tossed it to him. “You will, Rob.” He lay back against the bank and closed his eyes. Quietly he said, “To find Chloe, you would do anything.”

  Walking furiously down the village street, he almost collided with Dan.

  Dan took one look at him and said, “Come to my place? I’ve got this new recording of—”

  “No. Thanks.” He looked around absently. Then he went into the churchyard and sat on the grass. Dan came after him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Friday. What do you think’s wrong?”

  Dan pulled a face. “Sorry. I forgot.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “We could go weirdo-watching.”

  “I’ve seen you. Anyone else is an anticlimax.”

  “We could go to the flicks.”

  Rob shrugged.

  “Pub?”

  “I’m going home.” He scrambled up. “For a change.”

  “How’s the job?”

  Rob scowled. “Okay. It’s drawing, of a sort. No creativity in it though. Pared down. Emotionless. Just hundreds of tiny lines, showing what’s there.” He shrugged. “They don’t let me draw what’s not there. That’s what real artists do.”

  Dan pulled a baffled face. “Is it? No wonder I failed the GCSE. So what are they digging up? More stones?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it now. “Too early to tell.” Taking his hands out of his pockets, he found the hazelnut in one, and threw it hard at Dan, who caught it one-handed and yelled, “Hey!”

  “See you Sunday.”

  He had already walked three paces when Dan said, “Where did you get the hazelnuts?”

  Rob was still. Then he said, “From Annwn.”

  D. DUIR: OAK

  There seems to be a series of fortresses, each deeper in the wood. He calls this the second caer. Glass Castle.

  It’s brighter than the last. In fact the walls are nothing but a greenish shimmer so I can see that the slopes that were grassy yesterday are already thick with saplings.

  Last night (though it’s always night) he went up on the roof and stood looking east for a long time.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, coming behind.

  He rarely answers my questions, but he did this time. “A hole is opening in the world. Birds and bats are leaking out. Power is leaking out.”

  “When are you going to let me go?” I demanded.

  His eyes were puzzled through a new, oak-leaf mask.

  “Go where?” he said.

  I fled in raven’s shape,

  As a fast frog.

  I ran from my chains with despair,

  A roebuck in deep woods.

  THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

  “Well, something must have made it!” Clare Kavanagh folded her arms in fury. “Could a fox have got in here?”

  “I don’t know!” Marcus looked cowed. “Do foxes dig?”

  “Of course they do,” Jimmy muttered.

  The blond woman stared around. “If it was coin hunters waving metal detectors, they’re wasting their time.”

  “No one’s come over that fence, boss. And Max didn’t bark all night.”

  “He went to the door though,” Marcus said quietly. “Remember? Made a sort of growl.”

  Behind them, Rob pinned a new sheet to the drawing board, keeping his head down. No one took any notice of him; he wondered if they even realized he’d turned up this morning. Then he moved so he could see the hole too. “More like something came out than dug in,” he said quietly.

  Clare gave him a look of disgust. Then she said, “Let’s get on. Switch the sprays off. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

  It was Saturday, but they worked hard. When there was nothing left to plan, Rob got down in the henge and dug with them carefully around the dark timbers with a fine-pointed trowel. For hours he worked, absorbed in the delicate scraping of granules of soil, their infinite shades of browns and golds and ochers, all the earth colors folded and laid so finely on top of one another, each tiny layer that his trowel cut away a hundred years of time, of people living and dying, of wars and empires. Vetch had said time was a circle in the mind, but it was here too, lying dormant, packed hard in the stinking, drying, fly-buzzed remnants of the peat hollow. As he crouched and lay, sat and knelt, Rob felt the textures of the past grime his skin. There were clotted masses of fiber that he picked out and prized apart, finding minute leaves of long-dead plants and insects still perfect in the deoxygenated watery mass. He became absorbed in the work, just as he did with painting something with a very tiny paintbrush, his face close to the surface, cleaning the fissured edges of the timber posts, the ancient ridges smooth and hard as rock.

  Around him the others worked, Jimmy with headphones on, Clare and Marcus talking occasionally in undertones, Max the Alsatian ly
ing out in the field and lifting his head whenever a car purred up the lane.

  By lunchtime, when Rob straightened wearily to aching knees, it was clear that the timbers were not isolated from one another. As the soil between them was removed it could be seen that one side of each was shaven; that they joined one another; made a wall, a black fence. Only in one place was there a gap, obviously the entrance, where Marcus was scraping. There had been no finds. No more bits of antler bone, no gold, no charcoal, nothing.

  “There must be an object in the center.”

  Rob looked around. Clare Kavanagh was standing at his elbow. Today her blond hair was dragged back in a ragged plait, her ill-fitting blue overalls worn through at the knees. As she stared out thoughtfully, he thought she looked older than he’d realized. Tiny crow’s-feet were starting to wrinkle her skin. She turned; Rob jerked his gaze away. But all she said was, “You look at things very closely, don’t you?”

  He shrugged.

  “So do I.” She turned back. “The central deposit is the key. The ditch and the timber fence were built around it, built tight, so no one could see in, or get in. Only the elite. The priests, warrior-kings, whoever.”

  “The sorcerers,” Rob muttered.

  She shrugged, absorbed. “Maybe.” Then as if the word triggered something, she said suddenly, “Who were those people I saw you with in Avebury yesterday?”

  He froze. “Yesterday?”

  “Yes. I thought you said you were going to some hospital.”

  “I did. I was.” He sounded panic-stricken, he thought, so he pulled himself upright. “They were friends. They gave me a lift back.” And what business is it of yours? he wanted to add, but she was gazing at him now, a thoughtful scrutiny.

  “I thought… There was a man in the front seat. Dark-haired. I thought I recognized him.”

  “Vetch,” he said boldly.

  She frowned. “Wrong name. Does he live around here?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If it’s him…,” she said, almost to herself. Then she rounded. “Look, Rob, I can’t tell you who to see but I’m warning you, if people find out about this dig, then you’re the one I’m going to be blaming.”