by Manda Scott
‘Davy—’ She had to stop. She leaned forward, with her hands on her knees, spitting bloody mucus on to the tussocked turf. He came back to her and stood the same, breathing in a whistle.
‘How much further?’ she asked.
Wordless, he pointed. Ahead, in a corn field, a circle of trees blotted out the stars. He said, ‘Nearly there. No need to run now. Dawn’s not for an hour.’
They walked the last quarter of a mile down the track and along the narrow turf path that led out through a desert of planted barley to an oasis of trees and green grass. Stella was blind with exhaustion, seeing black against red in the backs of her eyes and feeling the ground with her feet. Gradually, the night settled to black and shadows of black and the pinprick stars above. The corn field was undulant as a grey sea. The circle of beeches whispered in the night. An owl crossed them. Somewhere, a dog fox barked. Down in the valley, a cock crowed, early. She heard no cars.
‘We’re there.’ They were among the trees, looking in to the centre, to the place of the ancient charcoal drawing Cedric Owen had hidden in the heart of the fire so long ago. The sketch had made her spine tingle. The real thing left her in a strained, light-headed place, where the world seemed suddenly far older, and the soft voices of the stones were as real as morning birdsong.
Ahead, a circle of ground rose in a squat, flat mound, circular and covered in turf. Its circumference was bounded by stone and at the front, facing her, four tall, sharp-topped stones reared into the black night. Between these, a low, stone-sided channel led to the squared stone entrance. Inside that, only black.
It was not a spectacular place; it had neither the majesty of Stonehenge nor the artistry of the running horse at Dragon Hill, but in its very simplicity was a power each of these lacked.
Davy came to stand beside her, his shoulder warm on hers. Presently, Stella said, ‘There were more standing stones in the picture.’
‘I think it was drawn a long time ago, when this was first built. Stone’s too valuable for building to leave it standing around doing nothing, and the Church wasn’t going to protect a place consecrated to the devil.’
Davy had caught his breath. The familiar sharp edge was back in his voice. He stepped up to the channel that led to the low doorway; a perfect alignment of two upright stones and a capstone, set back from the surrounding circle, fitted for thousands of years and proof against wind, rain and storm.
On either side, the four upright sentinels marked the front of the grave mound; tall as a man and as wide, but here, this close, it was the smaller, carved stone in the entrance that held Stella. Under the starlight, lines and shadows moved on it, undulant as the corn-sea in the field beyond. It spoke to her in the same tongue as the heart-stone sang, but she could not understand the words.
She said, ‘I had thought there would be more of a tunnel. It seems very short.’
‘It’ll open when you need it to.’ Davy stepped in front of her, blocking the route to the doorway. ‘It’s too early to place the stone in its setting,’ he said. ‘If I understood anything in Lapland, it was that timing is crucial. If you set the stone before dawn, or too late, you might as well not have bothered. And we can’t go in early – the entrance is blocked by solid stone. I tried it once when I was a kid; there’s a cruciform shape at the entrance with two small side arms, but then it’s just rock.’
‘Then we can’t go in,’ Stella said. ‘We’re finished.’
‘No. It’ll open. You have to believe that. It’s hollow inside. The archaeologists have been the full length. It will open.’
‘Once we’re in, how do we get out?’ Stella asked.
‘The same way we went in. There’s only the one entrance.’
‘Then it’s a death trap.’ Something was tugging at Stella’s mind, fainter than it had been in the car, but enough; that sense of a hound following a scent. The skull-stone was a hunting cat, crouched and waiting. She felt no fear from it now, only a sharpened awareness of the passing time. She said, ‘We’re still being followed. If we go into the mound and can’t get out, we’re dead. Don’t ask me how I know that.’
With no edge to his voice at all, Davy Law said, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Find somewhere among the trees where we can see but not be seen while we wait for dawn.’
They stepped back under the whispering beeches. Davy brushed old leaves from a stone and lay down with his head on it, cushioned on his arm. Stella hunched her shoulders against a tree, hugging her knees to her chest for warmth. She lifted the heart-stone from its bag and pulled it into the foetal circle of her abdomen, keeping the backpack to sit on.
The stone crouched in her mind, watching and waiting. From the mound came the same sense of old life, newly awakened. If she allowed it, she could see more sharply, hear more clearly, taste the growth of the trees in the air, name the small creatures feeding in the foot of the corn, stitch together the constellations to make words that she might try to read.
She blinked and the sharpening was gone, except that the stone and the mound were still there and still spoke one to the other, if not to her. She tipped her head back and stared up at the unshifting patterns of the stars.
‘Why are we here, Davy? You and I are scientists. We don’t believe Rosita Chancellor’s hysterical nonsense that the sun will walk down the path to the Underworld in five and a half years’ time and the earth will vaporize in a puff of superheated steam. It doesn’t happen like that.’
His voice came from the dark, scathing in its humour. ‘We might not think it happens like that. The Sami would tell you differently. They wouldn’t talk about superheated steam, but Ki’kaame can speak for nights on end about how the infantile white man is destroying the planet with his need to own everything.’
‘So what’s going to happen?’
‘I have absolutely no idea, but I’ll bet you the pension I don’t have that something big is coming soon that we’re too blind to see.’
‘Cultural imperialism?’
‘Cultural arrogance, certainly.’ He was angry now, quietly so, forgetting the approaching threat. ‘The Sami have it that we have fallen foul of the Enemy. They say that the gods made us self-reflective so we might venerate their wisdom and the beauty of their creation and instead we have used the powers of introspection to create hell on earth. As far as they’re concerned, when the nine skulls of the races of men join with the four beasts to raise the dragon, it’s more than likely that the end result will be a nuclear winter and the end of all human life. They’re quite resigned to the extinction of all their people if it will cleanse the earth of what we have become. The question is whether it’s likely, and frankly, every time I turn on the radio and listen to the news, I think we’ll be lucky if we get as far as 2012.’
Stella chewed the edge of a nail. ‘You can’t write off the whole human race just like that. Most of us are decent, peaceful, honest folk going about our lives without threatening anyone.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re missing the point. Compared to other cultures, we stink. We don’t care for our elderly, we don’t venerate the earth, we worship a cult of youth and pretend that death doesn’t happen when it’s the only certainty we’ve got, we destroy the old places that might have saved us – actually, if you listen to some of my mother’s wilder friends, we go out of our way to build motorway service stations on the nodes of the ley lines specifically in order to obliterate them. Ki’kaame will tell you that we are the fallen, while his people are still in Eden. If Lapland wasn’t so bloody cold, I’d agree with him.’
‘You’d rather live in a reindeer skin tent than in your mother’s farmhouse?’
‘I’d rather live amongst people who didn’t think mass graves were an unfortunate but necessary side effect of equally necessary violence. Or even that killing my mother is a sad but essential step on the road to sainthood.’
His voice was different; the edge of grief was not new, but underscored with a loathing Stella had not heard from him befor
e. Slowly, she said, ‘Davy, do you know who’s hunting us?’
It was growing lighter, not yet dawn but with a greyness that lit his eyes and smoothed the strange angles of his face until he looked very like his mother. His eyes met hers now, unwavering. He said, ‘I might be wrong.’
She felt sick. The stone was fully awake now, sharpening her senses beyond bearing. Her skin was raw. She could hear too much of the night. ‘Who, Davy?’
He shrugged. ‘Is it important to find a name? Every mass grave I’ve ever exhumed has been dug by someone who’s crossed the line to a place where the ends justify the means; where one person’s life, or ten, or a thousand, is a fair price for what they believe is right. Look at the people who rule over us if you want to understand what happens to men who listen to the whispering evil. Whatever they’ve sold their souls to doesn’t have the best interests of humanity at heart, but by God, they’re convinced they’re in the right.’
Stella said, ‘I read your mother’s translation of the ledgers. If she’s got it right, Nostradamus said the same to Cedric Owen when they met in Paris: that there’s a force that feeds on death and destruction, fear and pain, and needs these things to continue into the nadir of Armageddon.’ She closed her eyes, remembering. ‘It bends men to its will; intelligent, thoughtful men who believe that they can take the power they are offered and wield it only for good. But the nature of power is otherwise; it breaks them, always, and its greatest desire is that the thirteen stones might never again conjoin to deliver our world from misery.’
‘You learned it by heart?’ Stella could not see his face well enough to read the irony, or lack of it.
‘It made an impression,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t bring us any closer to who’s doing it.’
‘Oh, come on.’ He turned his head. His gaze scoured her face. ‘Who knew where you were going to look for the skull? Who knew you were coming to see me? Who knows my mother so well she won’t even countenance the possibility that he’s spent his entire life working to keep the blue heart-stone hidden?’ He sat up on one elbow, close enough now for her to smell the cigarettes on his breath. ‘Who’s the big fish in a tiny pond who has never really pushed himself into the limelight? Who served with the King’s Troop in Northern Ireland and has advised on the carnage in Iraq and knows how to make the kind of chlorine bombs that destroyed my mother’s farm and put her in hospital? Who—’
‘Who is walking down the Ridgeway, now, towards us?’ Stella said. She did not need the stone’s piercing warning to tell her that the hunter had found her; the mound itself was screaming in silent agony. With a sudden lucidity, she saw past, present and future come together. ‘Davy, would you take a risk for Cedric Owen’s heart-stone?’
‘I would give my life for it,’ he said, and she believed him.
‘Then take it into the mouth of the mound and wait until the tunnel opens. I’ll stay outside and keep them occupied. Dawn can’t be more than half an hour away. You know what needs to be done as well as I do.’
‘No.’ He was smiling in a way that froze her blood. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought she had made the ultimate mistake, and that he was the hunter. She raised the backpack, her only weapon.
‘Stella, don’t.’ He held up a hand. ‘I said I would die for it. I meant it. You have to place the stone, only you. It has your face and you are the one it speaks to. Ki’kaame told me eight, maybe nine times, Only the keeper can place the stone in the heart of the earth at the end of time. You go into the mound. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep him away. Go on. There isn’t time to argue.’
‘But I’m the one they’re looking for. They’ll go straight through you and I’ll be trapped. It’s half an hour till dawn.’
‘They?’
‘There are two of them, and they have a gun. If you won’t take the skull, go to the woods at the back of the mound and stay there. I’ll tell them you’ve already left. Go! You’re the only wild card we’ve got.’
‘OK.’ In one more astonishing moment in an astonishing night, Davy Law hugged her, and was gone, running more quietly than she had expected of him. She walked forward, along the circle of beech trees to the narrow green avenue that passed through the barley and the figure that limped slowly along it.
‘Kit!’ She reached for him, smiling.
‘Hey.’ He leaned on her shoulder and ruffled her hair. She could see the two parts of him as clearly as if he were two people. ‘Where’s Davy?’
The lie was the easiest she had ever told. ‘He’s gone back to the hospital. He’s worried about Ursula and I didn’t need him once I knew where to go. The mound’s here, in the clearing. It’s amazing. Come and see.’ She turned, tugging him by the wrist. He came slowly, using both sticks. The heart-stone had not ceased its warning. ‘You’re not walking well. Did you hurt yourself coming up the hill?’
‘No. I’d never have made it like this. I got a lift.’ He stopped and leaned against the first of the upright stones to catch his breath. ‘Tony brought me. I know what you think, but you have to trust him. He’s come to help. He’s just parking the car. He’ll be here any moment.’
She said, ‘He’s here now.’
A thin torch beam bobbed up the grassy track. The figure behind it emerged slowly from the pre-dawn mist that hugged the field, distorted and shrunken and not at all like Sir Anthony Bookless. With the blue heart-stone tensely silent, she stepped forward. ‘Tony?’
‘Not Tony,’ said Gordon Fraser grimly. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, a small, stumpy dwarf of a man; her friend, the best caver in Britain. He was unshaven and tired. His red hair made an unruly hedge about his head.
Stella lifted the blue heart-stone in greeting. He stood suddenly still. In his eyes was the same terror that had been there in his lab when the stone was first cleaned of its limestone coat.
Stella had forgotten that. Smiling, she said, ‘It’s all right. It’s a friend. It’ll help us.’
‘Aye?’ The small man shook his head sourly. Crab-wise, he shuffled towards her and found a seat on a stone. ‘Like Tony Bookless is a friend and he’ll help us and all. He’s a yard or two behind. It’s going to be one big grand reunion when the sun comes up, and then won’t the fireworks be spectacular?’
31
Skirwith village, near Ingleborough Fell, Yorkshire, April 1589
EASTER WAS PAST, and the privations of Lent; the lambs were white in the fields and the primroses grew yellow at the field edges.
A late frost rimed the scar of turned earth; where the sun fell was dew. Cedric Owen, now named Francis Walker, trader and would-be farmer, bent and laid a wreath of catkins on the grave of his wife’s father. The cracked bell of Skirwith’s church echoed a single note across the Yorkshire moor.
At his side, Martha Huntley, now Martha Walker, four months pregnant and just beginning to show it, bent also, and laid a lace of freshly picked daisies on the raw earth, which was what the old man had asked of her when he knew his final hours had come.
They stood together a while, listening to the start of the day, a man and the wife with whom he had not lain, and had no intention ever so to do. At length, Martha said, ‘He is dead a week. We gave our word that the heart-stone would be delivered to its place of safe keeping within a ten-day of his death. There is nothing to be gained by waiting.’
‘Except that Fernandez might come.’
‘He will not.’ She said it sharply, a poor disguise for the grief that still caused her nightly to weep in her sleep. ‘We should not wait for it.’
‘But still, the route to the cave’s mouth leads past the hawthorn. We can look on the way.’
He held their one chestnut gelding for her to mount. Of the three good horses they had brought north with them, one had died of colic soon after they arrived, and the bay mare, gift of Barnabas Tythe, had surprised them all by giving birth to a weedy, undernourished colt foal on the last day of the spring’s snow fall, a week to the day before Edward Wainwright’s death.
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br /> Martha settled her skirts and clucked for the horse to move on. Cedric walked at its shoulder in easy silence. They had not chosen each other, but their shared grief over the loss of Fernandez, and Owen’s obvious care for Edward Wainwright in his dying days, had brought them together much as a man might be with his sister, or she with her brother, so that each knew what the other thought without need to ask.
Their route took them out of the tiny churchyard with its squat church, past the grey hard-stone manor house, past the huddle of farmworkers’ cottages, of rough cobble and thatch, past the well and the small single-roomed inn that marked the ending of the village and out to the grey-green moorland, where only sheep could thrive.
Owen was still coming to grips with the landscape around him. By force of habit, he marked in his mind the places where willow grew along the beck, and the new holes that marked an active coney warren. A trio of young, fat rabbits skittered away from their approach. He noted them for later, and allowed himself to feel the small skip of joy at the thought of a hunt. He had not lain in wait for a coney since his childhood and had not realized how much he missed it until the chance was there again before him.
From above his shoulder, Martha said, ‘We could begin to sell the diamonds slowly now, I think, saying they were my legacy from my father. That would not arouse comment.’
‘As long as it does not arouse Walsingham’s interest, we will be safe. I would not relish having to flee again as we did that night.’
‘No.’ Martha shuddered and pulled her shoulder cloak more tightly about her. ‘With only one horse, that would go hard on us.’