by Manda Scott
‘But not impossible. It matters to remember that.’ She had been caught once in a cave where the way in was not a possible way out. She dreamed of it still, on the bad nights, when life pressed too close. ‘Light the flare and let’s see all that we haven’t seen yet.’
‘Ask and it shall be given.’ Kit locked the flare in a cleft high up where he could reach and she could not; six inches’ extra height was good for some things and bad for others. ‘Stand back.’
He lit it with his hand covering his face, as she had taught him, and stepped back before the magnesium fully lit.
White!
Blistering incandescence spilled from the cavern wall. Under its light, the stalagmites were virgin snow, the waterfall was a cascade of living ice, and beyond all the jagged shark’s teeth the cave’s roof was finally visible, a greying white limestone arch halfway to the heavens.
‘How high is it, do you think?’ Kit asked. His voice was lost in the rush and thunder of the waterfall.
‘A hundred metres? Maybe a bit more. We could climb one of the walls and find out if you’re feeling keen.’
‘Am I ever keen to lift my feet off the ground if I don’t have to?’ He grinned, weakly. ‘I’d rather find the skull.’
He leaned back on the wall, bit his glove off one hand, delved into the hidden pockets of his backpack, and came out with the precious folded paper, the print of Cedric Owen’s cipher, the pinnacle of three years’ work.
‘That which you seek lies hidden in white water. The waterfall is white.’
‘And the water is full of limescale, which is another form of white. Read me again the bit that comes after having the courage to go forward?’
He was a poet at heart, for all that he buried his head in hexadecimal code and computer languages. He turned so that the flare cast his shadow behind him and read aloud:
‘Enter with courage. Go forward as far as the dark allows. Step through night’s arch and come to the cathedral of the earth. Face the rising of the sun, and its setting, pierce the curtain to the well of living water and discover at last the pearl there entombed.’
He lowered the paper. Softly, he said, ‘We have come to the cathedral of the earth.’
‘We have. So next we have to face the rising and setting sun. But we didn’t step through night’s arch to get here, we crawled through a tunnel that wasn’t there before half a ton of rock fell into the route Cedric Owen took. We need to find out where he came in before we can work out where he went next.’
Stella stood at the margins of the magnesium white and turned in a slow circle. Her head-lamp cut a horizontal line along the wall, cutting through stalactites, snagging on outcrops, falling into a tall slice of darkness.
‘There.’
She ran to it, soft-footed on wet rock. The arch was more of a cleft, jaggedly asymmetric, higher than her upstretched hands, broader than her arm-span. She followed the dark space cautiously, rounding a bend, moving into a narrower passageway.
‘Stell?’ Kit was at the entrance, peering in.
She shouted back to him, cupping her hands against the echo. ‘This is it. The rock fall’s up ahead. It must be at least twenty metres thick. Our crawl-tunnel looped out and round to come out further along the cavern’s wall.’ She reversed back towards him, playing her torch over the passage walls. Here and there were smudges of colour that barely held her torchlight.
‘I think there are cave paintings on the wall.’ She could hear the awe in her own voice. ‘We’re going to have to tell people about this.’
She backed out, into the cavern, to the place where there was light enough to see, to look around, to search the high walls for other signs of ancient life.
‘God, Kit … I take it all back. There are better things than finding a cave no one has ever been in.’ She grinned at him, stupidly, her blood fizzing in her veins.
‘Stell?’
The flare was fading fast. Gobbets of molten magnesium fell hissing to the ground. In the yellowing light, she saw him pull off his head-torch and strip back the black neoprene hood. His hair glowed like gold in the poor light. There was a line of clean skin where the cap had been. He had half a day’s stubble, which had caught the mud. She saw what he was going to do and yanked off her own gloves, and touched her face and was glad that it was not clean.
He leaned forward, and lifted her torch clear of her head and stripped her cap back as he had his own. Coppery lights bounced off her hair and lit the water. He was near and warm and he smelled of sweat and fear and excitement and she loved him.
They closed the kiss in darkness, with no head-torches and no flare, and Stella was afraid, suddenly, for both of them, that from these heights there was only a long slope down.
He caught the swoop of her feeling. Hoarsely, he said, ‘Are you ready to face the rising of the sun and its setting?’
She checked the compass on her wrist. ‘I think that means we need to go east of the entrance and then west. There’s a river over by the north side of the cavern. Can you set the second flare somewhere up there, so that it shines on the wall and the water together?’
They had three flares. She very rarely used more than one on any caving trip. He wedged their second between two stalagmites at the side of the water-cut channel in the chalk, where she showed him. The magnesium spat and flared and the black ribbon of the river became a thread of silver in snow.
Stella said, ‘We don’t know how deep it is and it’s too wide to jump. We’re looking for a bridge, or a stepping stone, or a pinch point where we can cross.’
Kit was ahead of her, searching. He was back in neoprene with his lamp set at his brow. The smears on his cheeks made him more gaunt than he should have been. He said, ‘Why are we trying to cross the river?’
‘Because it’s the only good reason to go east before we go west. There must be a crossing point to the east so we can walk back west along the north wall. The waterfall is a curtain and there’s a pool at its foot that’s as close to a well of living water as we’re likely to get. It’s also as far from night’s arch as you can go in this cave. Owen was hiding his heart-stone to keep it safe for posterity. He didn’t want it to be easy to find, but equally not impossible. Therefore, across the river, which you wouldn’t do by chance, or even by choice, unless you had to.’
‘Then we’ll cross here, will we?’ said Kit uncertainly. ‘On the stepping stones that look like marbles?’
The stepping stones also rolled like marbles underfoot, so that, after a trial step on the first one, Stella made Kit wait while she set another bolt and strung out two lines at right angles to give maximum security before she tried again. She was glad of them when the third stone rolled under her feet and she felt the strength of the black current.
‘You’re cold,’ Kit said, when he joined her.
She might have tried to deny it, but his hand was on her arm, bouncing in time with her shuddering. She shrugged and made her teeth keep still from chattering. ‘Caves are always cold. I’ll be fine when we get moving again. And it’s not a bad thing to be wet if we’re going to have to dive for the skull.’
‘You don’t have the gear to dive.’ He sounded anxious, which was not at all like him; the water had unnerved him more than either of them had expected.
‘I have you. What more Kit do I need?’ It was cheap, but she was in need of easy warmth. ‘And we’re not coming back, are we? It’s too far and no cave in the world is as much fun a second time. I’ve got a mask and an underwater light. They’ll do.’
‘We might need the third flare.’
‘No. We don’t know what’s ahead. We might need it to get out. Come on, let’s have a look at the waterfall.’ Already she was regretting the profligate waste of the earlier light.
‘Face the rising of the sun and its setting. Pierce the curtain to the well of living water and discover at last … et cetera, et cetera.’
Her world was limited to the circle of her head-torch, and Kit’s beside her. In all
the looming blackness, the noise told her more than she had seen of the waterfall, of its size, and its volume and the plunging depth of the pool at its feet.
She tilted her head back to look up at the cataract, to guess its height. Her beam did not reach a point where there was no water, although right at the limit of its reach was turbulence, and a spray that reached far out into the cavern and danced like fairy lights so that she could believe the river’s head might be there.
When she looked down, she followed boiling ice-cold water that plunged deep into blackness for an immeasurable depth. For the hell of it, she found a stone the size of her fist and threw it in. It spun like a leaf in the violent water and vanished.
‘Pierce the curtain,’ Kit said. ‘Christ. How?’
‘I don’t know, but Cedric Owen did it four hundred and nineteen years ago without magnesium flares or a neoprene dry-suit and he came out alive, so we have to assume that it’s not as terrifying as it looks. I think if we—’
‘Stell?’
‘Take a look at the northern end of the rock face where the waterfall ends, then we—’
‘Stella …’
‘—might find that there’s a hollow in the space behind the water that will let us— What?’
‘I don’t think he did.’ Kit’s voice was flat, leached of all inflection.
‘You don’t think who did what?’
‘I don’t think Cedric Owen made it out alive. There’s a skeleton here, with not a bit of flesh on it, and a huge amount of limescale deposit, which suggests to my untrained eyes that it’s been here for a very long time.’
2
Beneath Ingleborough Fell, Yorkshire Dales, May 2007
THE SKELETON WAS starkly white, the bones made thick and uneven by layers of chalky deposit that welded it to the floor so that only the top half was truly visible.
Stella knelt by the curved sweeps of the pelvis and sent her light over all of it, tracing the lineage from toe to skull. A small, manic part of her mind sang songs to keep the dark at bay. The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone. The foot bone’s connected to the—
She shook her head. ‘It’s hard to see through all the calcium deposit, but there’s nothing obviously broken; no fractured spine or legs bent at bad angles.’
Kit stood a little back at the other side. His torch lit only the skull; a real skull, not the one of coloured stone that they had come to find.
He said, ‘It’s so peaceful. It’s laid out like a knight on a tomb, everything in straight lines and its hands folded over its chest. All he needs is a sword and—’
‘I think he’s got one. Look.’ Stella had a multi-function climbing tool on her rack, eight inches of light aluminium, strong enough to prod stubborn climbing gear from its wedged place in rock. She used the end of it to scrape the crumbling chalk from the thing that might have been a sword, but was too calcified to be clear. She said, ‘Maybe he was dead before he came here. Or he walked in alive, but came here to die.’
‘It’s not like you to make gender assumptions. Are you sure it’s a he?’
‘I’m not sure of anything. I don’t watch enough sexy pathologists on TV. Whoever he was, he was carrying something round his neck.’
Beneath the maybe-sword was something soft, which had not rotted away, but grown a shell of chalk. She wriggled it out and rolled it between her hands to break the stone.
‘It’s a leather bag, lined with something that’s kept the water out.’ With an effort, she teased apart the neck and tipped the contents into her hand. ‘It’s a pendant. Bronze, maybe, or copper.’ She rubbed the silt from the face. ‘Must be for you.’ She held it up. ‘It’s got Libra scratched on the back.’
At another time, in another place, they would have made a joke of it; one of the glues that bound them was a shared scorn of the gullible. In the presence of the dead man, it had value.
‘Show me?’ Kit’s torch angled down her shoulder.
‘It’s been scratched on with a nail, or the point of a knife – see? Libra with the sun and the moon at either end. If we turn it over—’ She did just that, rubbing it with her thumb. ‘There’s a crest. One of your ancient medieval cryptic sigils. Have a look.’
He cupped it in his ungloved hand and lifted it into the light of his head-torch. Because he was bending close to look, she saw the colour bleed from his face before he spoke.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘It’s a dragon under the risen half-moon.’ He was as Irish as she had ever heard him, as if Englishness bled from him in the presence of death. ‘That’s the Bede’s College crest. It’s on the stained glass window outside my bedroom; it’s above the gate to the Great Court and the archway to the Lancastrian Court and the door to the Master’s suite. As a medallion like this, it’s only ever worn by the Masters of Bede’s or their emissaries, in the days when they had emissaries.’
He dangled it over his forefinger like a rosary. Its shadow swept in arcs along the length of the skeleton. ‘This can’t be Cedric Owen. He was never anyone’s emissary.’ He spun a circle on his heel, sending his torch’s light bobbing out into the darkness. ‘In any case, he died at the gates to the college on Christmas Day in 1588, everyone knows that. I wonder if someone else has tried to come here to find the skull-stone?’
‘How? No one broke the code before us.’
‘No one that we know of.’ He handed her back the pendant, folding her fingers over it. ‘Will you keep this? We can try to find out whose it is when we’re back.’
She felt it cold through her gloves. ‘If it’s not Cedric Owen, then someone else died within reach of the heart-stone, exactly as the legends promise. “Everyone who has ever held this stone has died for it.” You told me that, and Tony Bookless said it again at the wedding. I don’t remember much else, but I remember that.’
‘Do you still want to try to find it?’
‘Definitely.’ She swept her light up the length of the cataract and down again. ‘Just let’s try not to add to the statistics.’
Stella had to dive in the end, and was glad of it.
After the edgy blackness of the cavern, the water was so rigidly cold that she had to clamp her teeth not to gasp against it and drown. Her diving head-light cast a beam three inches wide into the churning water. Kit held the rope and paid it out too slowly. She came up for air and silently took some more slack and breathed out all her carbon dioxide, breathed in half a lungful of air, and dipped under again.
On a good day, in a river, with sun above, she could hold her breath for a little over three minutes. Underground in temperatures this bad, she hoped for maybe half that. She had an idea, and barely enough breath to test it. She sent the line of her light due west, past the churning edge of the water to where the swirling currents cut alcoves and potholes in the rock. She could see nothing but white; white water, white rock, white light, so that only textures made them separate and only her hands could truly be trusted.
Still, the idea burned, and, more than that, growing as she came closer, was the sense of something waiting, welcoming, that whispered her onward, that asked her to have courage, and sent fire into her marrow against the terrifying cold.
Three times she came up for air. Three times, the swooping eddies pushed her back before she could reach the place where an anomaly of the current held the water still and the white rock lay wide and round as a cauldron.
She had a rule: always try three times and then stop. It had kept her alive in caves where ‘one more try’ would otherwise have become ten more tries and the exhaustion of failure would have left her too tired to turn round and climb out.
She was ready to stop now, but for the whispered encouragement, the promises and the urgent insistence that made her take more rope from Kit and duck down again and kick forward hard through the wall of white turbulence to the black space beyond.
There, in the dizzy light of her head-lamp, was the lip of cavitied rock. She grabbed it with both hands and tilted her head to spi
ll light down inside, to see what Cedric Owen had hidden there four centuries earlier.
They had come looking for a blue stone in the shape of an unfleshed man’s head. What lay in the black water before her was a blob of chalk, a lumpen, misshapen pearl with barely a shadow of eyes and nose and mouth to suggest the skull within. Even so, to her eyes, it was beautiful. She balanced on her waist and leaned down to reach it.
Blue!
A blinding intensity of blue, that made her gasp even as her heart leaped like a salmon in her chest. She lost a mouthful of air and choked and spat water and came to the surface in a flurry of panicked coughing.
‘Stell, you’ve been in too long. Come on out. No piece of stone is worth dying for. We can leave it.’
Kit was at the water’s edge, leaning in against the pull of his three-line belay.
‘No!’ She waved an arm high over her head. ‘It’s there! I can get it. One last time …’
Once more, she ducked down into the black water, kicked back to the cauldron’s edge and sent light into it. Stiff with cold, her hands reached down into the churning dark, to the pearl beyond price that was Cedric Owen’s skull-stone.
The blue was less intense a second time, and she was waiting for it. The skull-stone came to her hands, singing its welcome.
‘Stell, you’re freezing. We have to get moving, get you out, get back into sunlight.’
‘Give me chocolate and hold me and I’ll be fine.’
She was stupidly, insanely cold. Her marrow was a solid lump of ice. Her hands had lost all feeling. Experience told her she would have a sore throat in two days and be coughing in five. She sat in torch-eating darkness, ten feet from a skeleton of unknown gender, age, race and name, clutching an ugly, uninspiring lump of limestone that was barely identifiable as a skull – and she was as happy as she could ever remember.
She let Kit hold her, let him fold his arms and his legs and his whole body around her, let his warmth feed her and keep her safe.