by Manda Scott
‘Not on a hillside, less than half an hour’s drive from here?’
‘Ah.’ A broad smile dawned on his face. ‘The horse that might not be a horse. I never really thought it was. And if you took the wings from Stella’s dragon here, it would be very much like it. Well done, cousin mine. I knew there would be something.’
The flush of understanding made him boyish. He raked both hands through his hair. ‘Stella, have you ever seen the White Horse of Uffington?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘You’d know.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘It’s a Neolithic monument, at least five thousand years old, probably older. Our ancestors carved the shape of a horse into the hillside, taking away the turf to show the white chalk beneath. It’s best seen from the air, but even close up it’s a breathtaking sight and the best place from which to sit and look at it is called Dragon Hill. At this time of day, you can park right at the side and walk straight up. Take your medallion and your skull and see if they think it’s a good place to be. And take Kit while you’re at it.’
‘I can’t…’
‘You can. You’re four volumes ahead of us in your transcriptions. You deserve an hour or two off.’
The misunderstanding was deliberate. Stella might have argued, but Kit was there, standing at the French windows, blocking her route back into the study. For a moment, she believed it an accident, then remembered the length of time Meredith had taken to bring the iced tea. She had not thought to look back at the house since.
Feeling hotly cold, light-headed and leaden, she stood up. She could think of nothing to say.
Woodenly, Kit said, ‘I’ve been there once, a long time ago. I know the way, but you’ll have to drive.’
‘Do you want to go?’
He shrugged. ‘Do you?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Ursula Walker from behind her. ‘Just go. Go together. Walk up the hill together, sit at the top together, and for heaven’s sake talk about something other than the weather when you get there. It’ll be worth it, trust me.’
‘There are steps,’ Stella said. ‘You don’t have to crawl up the side of the hill.’
‘I don’t want to use the steps. They’re an affront to the wildness of the place. Just go ahead and stop looking at me. It doesn’t help.’
Already, the sun was a lavender bruise on the western horizon with washed veils of tangerine above. A waxing half-moon hung high overhead, the light more amber than mercury.
The car was parked illegally at the roadside. The small, flat-topped hill grew out of the road, with the steps newly cut and faced in wood. On the far side, where Kit climbed, the slope was tussocked and steep. Stella used her hands to pull herself up and did her best to study the grasses and white-starred meadow flowers against the surprising urge to look back at Kit and help him.
He was more agile on all fours than trying to walk, and going up was easier than going down. He put on a burst of speed at the end and reached the top before her. In silence, he offered his hand to haul her up the last strides. His hands were soft again; three weeks in a bed had worn off the calluses of the cave. His fingers were long and fine.
Uncertainly, she hooked her own through them, and drew herself up. The top was a place of sun-dried turf worn away at one point to make a patch of white chalk in the shape of a sickle moon. There was room there for two people to sit. Perforce, they sat together, staring down at the grass. The silence stretched.
Kit said, ‘Have you looked at the horse yet?’
‘Not yet.’ She did not think he had, either. A shared perversity kept them both from it.
Kit lay back on the turf. The late sun cast long spears of gold across his face. The green harlequin bruises were a faded remnant, merging with the grey mosses. ‘Is this the place appointed?’ he asked.
‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘The skull-stone says so?’
‘Yes. It feels safe here, as it does at Ursula’s farmhouse, but no more than that.’ The backpack that held the stone lay openly at her side. For the drive and all the way up the hill, Kit had ignored it. Stella was surprised that he mentioned it now. She did not say more, that the stone was awake, and sharply aware, and that there was a sense of threat for which she had no name and no direction, save that it was not for now.
After a while, when she could think of nothing to say and the silence was too thick to break, she lay back on the grass and let her eyes rest on the sky. A plane grew out of the burning sun and moved across from west to east, slow as an ant. Long after it had gone, the white vapour trail stayed behind, a single linear flaw cutting across a domed sky that was the same perfect blue as her skull-stone.
Kit was warm at her side. She could feel him breathing in the push of his arm against hers. She remembered other summer days, on other grass, when a blue sky was simply blue and did not hurt like this.
She said, ‘I should have thrown the stone away when Tony Bookless asked me to.’
‘I don’t think so. Unless Ursula and Meredith are both mad and—’
‘They’re pretty strange.’
She felt him smile. ‘Granted, but I don’t think they’re delusional. In which case you are the skull’s rightful keeper with all that entails. I don’t want to be responsible for the end of time just because I can’t handle how you feel for a stone.’
‘Is it about the stone? Or is it the stone and me together? I am no longer the woman you married. You said that the night you got back from hospital and I’m sure it hasn’t changed. It’s probably grounds for divorce. If that’s what you want, I won’t contest it.’
‘Stell?’ He tried to push himself up on one elbow, but she was on his bad side, and his arm would not hold him. Trout-like, he flopped on his belly with one arm across her. She lay very still while he sorted himself out and came to rest on his elbow, with his weight carefully kept from her torso. His eyes were above hers, looking into her. ‘Why do you think I want a divorce?’
‘You haven’t spoken a complete sentence to me since we first got to Ursula’s. Actually, not since we left Davy Law’s. And if you’re jealous of him too, we really are finished.’
This close, he could not hide the flicker of panic in his eyes. ‘Do I have reason to be?’
‘Kit? Tell him that’s a joke …?’
He braced himself and rocked away from her. ‘You wouldn’t be the first woman I’ve loved who’s fallen for him. I really don’t want to go there again.’
‘Davy Law?’ She laughed aloud. ‘Give me a break. He’s not quite as bad as you made out, but he’s probably the least attractive man I’ve ever seen. He has the peculiar integrity that only the truly ugly ever really have and for that I respect him enormously. I’d like him as a friend, but I don’t love him. I’m not sure I could love anyone else just yet. You’ll be a very hard act to follow.’
She had not meant to say that. She blinked, harshly. ‘Was it Jessica Warren you lost to him before?’
He did not answer. She thought he could not. Understanding dawned on her, bright and sure and not, after all, so complicated. She could have laughed at the ease of it. Lightly, she said, ‘Is that what this is all about? Hurt pride over a lost lover you’ve never told me about?’
He was shy, which she had never seen. ‘She wasn’t a lover. But I wanted her to be. I never even asked her out for a drink.’
‘Kit, you daft—’
‘Davy doesn’t bother about things like that. He doesn’t do diffident, or humble, or socially inept. He simply asked her out, and she said yes and that was it, they were joined at the hip. She thought the same as you, that he shone from the inside.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I was very grown up about it.’
‘And then he tried to rape her? Or did he actually do it?’
‘That’s what everyone said – but then so many people hated him for being brighter than they were; they were all too happy to kick him when he was down.’
‘What did Davy say?’
‘He didn’t. Jess was o
ut of it – she’d screwed up spectacularly in the race, then left and went home to her mother’s without telling anyone anything. And Davy went missing. I spent the next few days defending him to everyone who was ready to think the worst, all the while waiting for him to come back and explain that it had all been a ghastly mistake – that maybe he’d been overenthusiastic, wanting to celebrate the boat race before it had ever happened; that Jess had told him to sod off and they’d had a screaming match and he was sorry; something like that. He wouldn’t have raped her; he really wouldn’t. He hated the “all men are rapists” argument; it was one of the few things guaranteed to make him see red.’
‘What happened next?’ Stella asked.
‘Nothing. He never came back. He was halfway through his surgical houseman’s year, all set to be a world class neuro-surgeon or a paediatric cardio-thoracic specialist – whatever he wanted, really – and he threw it away. He just disappeared from the face of the earth. The college hierarchy clearly knew something because they weren’t dredging the Cam for his body or checking to see if he’d gassed himself with a car exhaust, but they said nothing to the rest of us. I didn’t know where he’d gone until the other day when Gordon told us about the refugee camps. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over ten years.’
‘Until last Friday.’
‘When he was practically crawling into your lap, looking like he wanted to eat you, and he’d planted your face on the skull on his computer. I could have killed him. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t.’
‘Because he was your best friend once and you know better.’ Stella sat up, hugging her knees. ‘If it makes any difference, Davy told me he’d tried to take something beautiful once and he was never going to make the same mistake again. I’d say he’s had a hard lesson and taken it to heart.’ She stared up at the evening sky. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘Jealousy isn’t pretty, Stell. Am I not allowed some pride?’
‘Of course. Just not stupid, idiot, dumb’ – she reached for his hand and pulled him close – ‘heartbreaking pride. Not the kind where I can’t reach you through the walls you build from it.’
‘You nearly did.’ He was near enough to kiss, and she did not dare. His eyes were gateways through which she could pass, but not yet.
‘With the stone? I’m so sorry, Kit. I fucked up so very badly.’
‘You didn’t fuck up. You just—’
‘I just didn’t think. I had the skull in my hands and I knew what to do and I didn’t question whether it was right until you told me to stop. It was fantastically stupid.’
‘But you did know what to do? You could have made me better?’
‘It seemed like it.’ She touched her lips to his cheek. ‘I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be like this.’
‘But it is, that’s the point.’ He was silent a while. The sunlight deepened to amber. The high moon brightened with it. ‘I’m trying to imagine what might happen to end the world, and how a scary lump of blue crystal might change it. I get stuck until I remember a wasp that didn’t drown. Then anything seems possible, even the solar flares and global meltdown and dragons arising to battle the ultimate evil. Unless the dragon is the ultimate evil, and we’re letting it out of its lair, which would be unfortunate.’ He pressed his own lips to hers, chastely. ‘The sun’s nearly gone. Shall we look at the horse while it’s still there to be seen?’
‘Go on then.’
She rolled away, letting Kit sit up. Later than him, she looked up.
‘My God …’
It was only a horse, a white horse, carved in simple, flowing lines from a green hillside to show the white chalk beneath. It was only chance that the sun and the moon spilled even light across it, so that the white glowed as liquid fire. It was only a buzzard that spiralled down to lift a kill from the heart of the horse, and looked at her a moment, eye to living eye, before it rose again, flapping, to the high, vaulting sky.
It was not chance at all that the horse on the hillside was exactly the dragon on Cedric Owen’s medallion, alive in all its wild beauty. All it lacked was wings.
‘Kit, do you see …?’
He dragged her hand to his lips and crushed them with it. ‘Don’t speak. We’re here at the balance between day and night and no one can take it from us. It’s perfect. Please don’t speak.’
For full thirty seconds, she held herself silent against the breaking ocean within. Then, ‘Kit, say that again?’
He huffed amused frustration. ‘It’s perfect. Please don’t—’
‘No, before that, about balance.’
He frowned, caught by her tone. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘“We’re here at the balance between day and night.” Balance. It isn’t Libra on the medallion. It is the scales. And it isn’t weighing the sun against the moon in Bede’s window. We were all wrong!’ With one hand, she was scrabbling in her shirt, pulling out the medallion; with the other, fighting to get into her pockets for her mobile phone. ‘Why did we not see this before? Meredith was right, Owen did leave us what we needed in more than one place.’
‘Stell, you’re not making sense.’
‘Hush.’ She flapped one hand. With the thumb of the other, she speed-dialled Ursula’s number. The phone rang once and was answered.
‘Ursula, it’s the summer solstice! The day after tomorrow!’ The words tumbled over themselves. Kit made a sign to slow down and be calm.
Stella took a breath and tried again, spacing the words. ‘The scales on the stained glass window and the sign of Libra scratched on the back of the medallion show the same thing. They’re weighing day against night, not sun against moon. On the longest day, the light weighs most against the dark. Does that fit with the dogs and the bats?’
‘Wait, I’ll check.’ There was a tight, cluttered moment, filled with the rattle of keyboard and the muted chimes of a PC in action, and Ursula shouting for Meredith, then a pause.
Hoarsely, Ursula said, ‘9 Oc, 18 Zotz is the 21st of June 2007. That’s the day after tomorrow. I can’t think why we didn’t look before.’
‘It doesn’t matter, we have it now. And we’ve got the time of day to go with it. The stained glass window shows the dragon arising at dawn on a day when there’s a waxing half-moon in Virgo. So the time appointed is thirty-six hours from now, give or take twenty minutes. All we need now is the place.’
‘Is it not the white horse?’
‘The skull-stone doesn’t think so.’
‘Then we’re stuck because it’s nowhere in the manuscript and we’ve translated all you’ve transcribed.’ For the first time, Stella heard panic in Ursula’s voice. ‘Meredith’s gone into town to check some of the glyphs against the dictionaries in the Bodleian, but I don’t hold out much hope. In the last bit we’ve translated, Owen has just come back from the New World to England. He’s fought his way across half of Europe – or de Aguilar has on his behalf. But he doesn’t know the location of the place he’s looking for in England. He says so clearly in the text.’
‘Well he must have found it before he died. There are four volumes to go. We’ll come home now and I’ll finish the transcription. It has to be in there.’
It was ten o’clock on the night before the solstice and Stella had one more page left to transcribe.
She was alone in the study; Kit had gone to bed and Ursula was working upstairs in her bedroom; too much proximity had not helped either her or Stella work.
Outside, it was night. The half-moon was setting. It lay on the far horizon, bright against a backwash of stars.
The last page wavered on the screen.
12 March 1589, From Francis Walker, who was once another man, my thanks for all you have done …
She could not focus. The skull-stone sat on the desk in plain view; Kit had asked her to put it there. The blue eyes observed her, uncannily sharp, too much like life for comfort. Aloud, she said, ‘You look like my grandfather.’
It was not entirely true, only that, of all he
r family, her mother’s father had looked most like Stella. For sixty years, he had raised sheep on Ingleborough Fell, through summer heat and winter snow and at the end, when she was small and he was old, she had thought the weather had taken all the flesh from him and laid his skin in brown wrinkles on the planes of his skull.
From the hazy hollows of her memory, her grandfather said, You should wake, child. It is not a time for sleeping.
‘I’m not sleeping. I’m working. It just feels like sleep.’
No. The voice was different. Stella blinked again. Where had been her grandfather was a younger woman, like her and yet unlike, with darker hair braided to her elbows, and skin more brown than white. You dream, and should wake, else it was all for nothing. Wake now!
She clapped her hands. The noise was like a falling plank. Stella woke.
In the study was smoke, sliding at floor height, coiling up the legs of the chair. The skull-stone sat in darkness, and had no points of light in its eyes. The flat screen of the computer was blank, the machine itself quiet in sleep.
Stella rubbed her eyes and inhaled, deeply. In the blue place of her mind, the skull-stone awoke as if from a deeper dreaming.
The scything yellow of its panic met the force of her own terror. She grabbed the laptop and ran for the door and filled her lungs and shouted.
‘Fire!’
24
Trinity Street, Cambridge, Christmas Eve 1588
DR BARNABAS TYTHE, reader of physic and philosophy and Vice Master of Bede’s College, Cambridge, was enjoying the blaze and crackle of his own fire, alone in the blessed privacy of his own lodgings, when the rap came at the door.
He ignored it, being lost in contemplation of a letter. Solitude had slowly become him. His wife’s death was an old thing, to be dusted off and remembered awhiles on the nights when the city was quiet and sleep would not part its curtains to allow him entry.
The pain of loss was present still; Eloise had been a friend and confidante as much as a bed-mate, but the early knife-ache of her absence was a dull prodding now, so familiar as to be part of his fabric, knit deep into his flesh and bones.