The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  The journey had killed her father. Edward Wainwright had never truly recovered from the cold and misery of ten days spent on the roads in the January snows. Neither of them said it; they had never indulged in recriminations, but it was there between them as yet another thing to keep them separate.

  Whatever happened to Fernandez, Owen did not rate highly the chances that this marriage might ever become anything but a convenience for either of those enmeshed in it. He kept his thoughts for the growing child, whom he must rear as his own, in the hope that one day he would be able safely to tell it the history of its true father.

  Steepening, the path rose up Ingleborough Fell. They picked up a new river and followed its bank to the sharp turn and the ford Owen had remembered from his childhood. The hawthorn tree that was their marker grew gnarled and bent and there was neither linen nor a square of white wool tied to it, to show any hint of the fate of Fernandez de Aguilar.

  Owen watched the shadow of hope pass from Martha’s face, saw her set her jaw and shrug on the weight of another day’s disappointment. He feared that the weight one day would crack her, and mourned in his own right that he was powerless to make it different.

  He smiled for her, thinly, and wondered if she saw the same in him; he thought it likely.

  She turned the horse away from the thorn bush. ‘We should go to the cave,’ she said. ‘I brought candles and a skein of wool and a pitch torch. Do you need aught else?’

  ‘Only courage,’ Owen said. ‘I was never enamoured of the dark.’

  He spoke to her retreating back; she was urging the horse to a fast walk, so that he had to run to catch up. She slowed for him, out of pity, and they walked along together in the growing clamour of the morning.

  Presently, over the high trilling of the larks, she said, ‘When today is over, we need never return here again. We could go west towards the coast. Since Spain, I have had a liking for the sea air.’

  ‘Due west of here is Ulverston. We could do far worse than buy some land there and farm it. The sea air makes it harsh, but it is beautiful in the early morning.’

  They were talking for the sound of their own voices and soon stopped. The mare was surefooted and Owen let her pick her own way up the hill. A buzzard made wide lazy sweeps overhead. Half a mile to their right, a handful of crows erupted from behind a gorse thicket and sprang upwards, flung rags, tumbling high into the air.

  ‘A dead lamb,’ Owen said, not thinking. ‘Or a ewe—’ He stopped.

  ‘Died at birthing,’ Martha finished for him. ‘I had thought of that. But is it not strange that the carrion birds have left their feast when we are so far away?’

  ‘It would seem we are not alone on this hillside, even now, when the morning is so newly broken.’ Owen slowed the horse to a stop. The blue heart-stone lay warm and heavy against his side. He heard from it the faintest warning, not a certain thing, but a caution to be wary.

  He said, ‘It might be a shepherd, but we should take no chances. You should go back. If we are betrayed, it will do no good for both of us to be caught in the open.’

  ‘If we are betrayed, I would rather be caught in the open than die in my bed at night. Or in the Tower, at Walsingham’s pleasure.’ Martha shuddered, and he thought she might be sick again, as she had been on first waking. ‘Promise me that if we are assaulted and you think we may die, you will give me a swift end before it is too late?’ She sensed his hesitation. ‘Fernandez would have done such a thing for me; he said so on the night we …’

  She was an honourable woman; Owen had never known her to lie. Against his every instinct, he said, ‘I give you my word that if we are assaulted, I will do whatever I may to see you on the road to freedom. If that is impossible, I will not let you be taken to London. In return, will you wait here and let me go ahead?’

  She set her jaw obstinately. ‘You carry the heart-stone. Yours is the greater risk.’

  ‘And it has never yet let me walk into danger. Please – you carry Fernandez’ child, which must be protected. The horse cannot come much further anyway. We must go on foot beyond here.’

  ‘Then we go together. Fernandez left you in my care as much as me in yours.’

  He had tried to argue with her once or twice before in their four months together and had found her almost uniquely intransigent. He gave way with what grace he could muster and helped her down from the gelding, setting hobbles about its forelegs that it might not wander too far should they need it.

  ‘Let us go then. The opening to the cave is upwards and to our right. If you see a flare of yellow gorse with sharp grey rock behind it, it is to the right of that. Climb with your head low. We cannot avoid being seen, but perhaps they can be confused as to how many of us there are.’

  The heart-stone did not want to go into the cave, that much was obvious. Owen felt from it the same fierce, wordless grief he had sensed from women dying in childbed; knowing that something worthwhile must come of their ending, but grieving that they cannot live to see it.

  It was disconcertingly different from the two most recent deaths he had attended in friendship. Edward Wainwright and Najakmul had both reached the end of a good life fully lived and had stepped up to meet death’s embrace with something close to enthusiasm.

  Both, with their dying breaths, had urged on him the absolute necessity to bring the blue heart-stone home to this place and leave it there. Both had warned him that it would not want to come.

  Only now, as he stepped into the cave’s mouth, did he realize the strength of its resistance. He had pushed up the last half-mile of hillside against a force as strong as gravity that held him back, listening all the while to the keening in his mind that was either a warning of mortal danger or a desperate grief and he could not tell which.

  ‘We’ll wait here a while,’ he said. ‘If someone is following, we shall see them before they see us.’

  The opening was a slantwise crack in the wall of rock ahead of them, half hidden by a stand of thorns. Owen caught Martha’s elbow and drew her in and sideways, to a dry, flat place where they could see out while being hidden from without by the trees. They stood in the half-darkness, breathing heavily from the climb.

  At their back, solid, chalky rock reached up to a high-pitched ceiling. To their left, the sun moved on to the moor, drawing brighter shades from the heather and bracken. To their right, a tunnel sloped into darkness, wide enough at its start for them both to pass together, although in Owen’s memory it narrowed a good deal towards its end.

  He waited, letting his eyes adjust to the grey light. Old swallows’ nests tucked into the nook of the roof’s peak came slowly into focus. A wren flitted in and out again swiftly, a splash of colour in the gloom. Presently, when nobody came and there was no further excuse for delay, Owen did what he had done as a youth exploring these caves; he brought to mind his grandmother, and her care of the blue heart-stone.

  There was a particular memory from his early teens when she had begun to show him the ways of the stone. On a mellow evening in autumn, with piles of russet leaves burning in the orchards and gooseberries cooking for an evening tart, she had taken him to the quiet room to the north of their house and shown him what might be done with candles to make the light come from the skull’s eyes.

  He had practised under her tuition until he got it right, feeling the growing bond to the stone as he might feel it with a newly leashed hound, or – better – a hawk that came willing to the fist. Slowly, concentration gave way to elation until his world sparked brightly alive.

  At the end, he had almost turned the soft beams of blue on to his grandmother, but she had put up her hand to stop him, saying that she liked her hair white and did not want it to go dark again. He had taken it as a joke and had lowered the skull and lifted instead the candles, one in either hand, and framed her face in their light. She had been beautiful then, and at peace.

  Later that evening, she had described to him the caves she knew of, and the way to find the cathedral of the ea
rth. She had not asked him to go, only mentioned where it was, believing that, however great his fear of small, cramped places, he would have to see it.

  His fear was greater than she had known. He had not gone that autumn, but waited until spring, which was too late to tell her of the beauty he had found for she was dead by then.

  As his gift to her, he had gone into the labyrinth of tunnels, carrying as his bastion against the dark the memory of that one moment when the light of two candles had lit her face to wise gold.

  Robbed of the heart-stone’s solace, he did the same again now, although it was hard to know if the face that lit his mind was hers or Najakmul’s; these two had begun to blur in his memory. Whichever it was, either or both, he used her to anchor his courage much as he anchored the loose end of the woollen thread, that he might find his way out to daylight again safely.

  Martha was at his side, watching him knot the wool and fix the end in a crack where it would not pull out. As with all gravid women, her hand lay over the small swell of her belly.

  Owen said, ‘If you wish to remain here, I will come back to you as fast as the tunnel permits.’

  ‘I would gladly accept, but I promised my father I would see the place where the heart-stone lay,’ she said grimly. ‘We who walk the trackways have our own fates to fulfil.’

  She had his grandmother’s courage. As they turned towards the dark, he saw the last colour leak from her cheeks and the fine lines about her eyes grow sharper.

  He gave her a chaste hug, swiftly gone. ‘It’s worth seeing, when we get there,’ he said, ‘and the first part is easy. Just imagine you are walking the corridor in your house at night with no candles.’

  The route in was not as bad as his childhood memories had told him, but it was not something he wished ever to repeat again.

  At length, they stood side by side on flat ground, with the roof too high above their heads to feel, and no walls pressing in on either side. The sound of a waterfall surrounded them, so that it seemed as if they must stand within it.

  ‘Here, we can light the candle, and the lantern,’ Owen said, and then, with a child’s love of mystery, ‘Would you close your eyes?’

  He carried flint and tinder, and a spill of woven grass. Even for one who had seen it before, the wonder of the place struck the heart, so that he had to remind himself to light the lantern and hold it up and say, with unexpected shyness, ‘If it please you, would you look now?’

  ‘Oh, Cedric …’

  It was worth the dark and the cold and the fear. Almost, it was worth there being only two of them there, not the three it should have been, for the moment when his wife, Martha Walker, turned to him with her soul in her eyes and could not find the words to say what she felt.

  He moved close and hugged her again, one-armed, as Fernandez had done. ‘There is no need to speak. Only look and remember, so that the generations after may know that the cathedral of the earth is worth the route they must take to find it.’ He gave her the lantern, and took forward only the candle. ‘If you will stay here, I will place the heart-stone in its resting place.’

  ‘I should come—’

  ‘No.’ A swift pain grabbed at his heart. ‘I must do this alone.’

  He lit four more candles and set them on ledges about the arched entrance, that she might sit in ample light, then left her and retraced the steps he had taken once before, east for twenty paces, and then across the river on stones that rolled unsteadily underfoot. Turning west again, he followed the line of the river’s edge to the astonishing, soul-lifting beauty of the waterfall.

  Caught in the sooty light of the lantern, it cascaded as living gold into the wide stone crucible at its foot, where the white rock caught it and made it quicksilver.

  His grandmother had described the place as the well of the living water and he could think of no better words.

  Balancing the lantern on his knee, Owen sat on the edge, ignoring the wet, and drew the heart-stone at last from the leather satchel in which it had travelled half a world and back again.

  It rested quietly between his hands, silent now that the end had come. He felt its mourning as a heaviness about his heart, that dragged him down and down until he sank to kneeling on the cold chalk of the cavern’s floor.

  All elation drained from him, all sense of beauty, all joy in his own success. In the heart of the cavern, his world emptied of light and colour, scent and touch, song and love. In this new deadness, he understood for the first time how his life must be with the heart-stone gone. He could not bear it.

  ‘Why must it be so?’

  He cried aloud and the sound sank into the well of white water and was gone. He did not speak again, only sat in the dark space of his soul and looked back at his life with a bitter wonder that he had not thought to ask the question until it sprang now to his lips.

  In his childhood, his grandmother had told him of the stone’s resting place, and he had accepted it without question, as he had done everything else from her. In the springtime of his life, Nostradamus had spoken this destiny and Owen had wondered only that another man could know it. Najakmul had said it again, more clearly, had trained him for it through thirty years in paradise and he had thanked her daily for it and had come to England driven only by the need to reach this place and leave his record for the ones who must come after.

  Most bleakly, Fernandez de Aguilar, a man with everything to live for, had given his life that the skull might be brought here to its place of safe keeping, that future generations might find it when the world had greatest need.

  Cedric Owen did not care about the world’s need. He wept for his own pain, and for Fernandez, and for Martha, and for the stone.

  You would undo all that we have done?

  The voice was one he knew most intimately, else he would not have looked up. Najakmul was there, standing in the power of the waterfall. She reached a hand for him. If I tell you that the stone will be here, where I am, would that ease for you the pain of parting? You will not be long without it.

  A spray of water reached him, lighter than rain. Najakmul said, Have you asked the stone what it wants of you?

  He had not. He had thought its will was his, its heart was his. A quiet blue reached him, from the still place of his soul. It grieved. It did not challenge its destiny, or his. And it attested Najakmul’s truth.

  Through the cascading water, she spoke again. Give it to the living water, son of my heart. Your life’s work is near to done.

  Son of my heart. So she had called him in her last days alive. It was that that gave him the courage to rise, to lift the heart-stone so that it might hold for one last moment the light of the candles and the cascading silver of the waterfall.

  The well of white water boiled beneath, and opened, as a heart opens, to show the still black of its core.

  ‘Cedric!’

  Bright searing yellow sliced across his mind, with Martha’s voice twined through it, from the far side of the chamber. Across the river, in the flaming light of four candles, he saw her struggling with one, maybe two, assailants.

  His need balanced on a knife edge, his two duties opposed. With a courage unmatched, Cedric Owen launched the stone that carried his soul into the bowl beneath the cataract. White water rose around it as a crown. The flash of its last blue lay stitched across his vision for an age after it was gone.

  * * *

  He was already running, lantern in one hand, eating knife – uselessly – in the other, back across the river to where Martha Walker battled with the men who would take her life and that of her unborn child.

  32

  Weyland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire, 5:00 a.m. 21 June 2007

  DAWN CAME SLOWLY to the Oxfordshire countryside. The stones about the grave mound were the first thing to show colour; splashes of grey lichen became, as Stella watched them, more subtly green. In the valley, the cock gained confidence. Overhead, a crow barked from the highest beech. Lately, a wren had begun to reply.

  Branch
es cracked near the road. Tony Bookless was a formless shape, striding up the avenue of trees towards Weyland’s Smithy, sending his voice ahead as a beacon in the poor light.

  ‘Stella, you’re there!’ He fairly ran the last few yards, crashing in through the trees to come, breathless, to the open space before the mound. ‘And Kit. And Gordon. And the skull-stone. That’s good.’ He named them off like a roll call, but his eyes never left Stella and the blue stone that lit the air around her. His right hand was jammed awkwardly in his pocket. She could count the flat ridges of his knuckles. ‘Where’s Davy?’

  Somewhere to her right, a moving branch became suddenly still. ‘He went back into Oxford,’ Stella said. ‘I didn’t need him here once he’d shown me the mound and he’s worried about his mother.’ She could lie to him now with a clear conscience. It gave weight to the words.

  ‘Of course.’ He nodded, solemnly, the Master dealing with unfortunate news. ‘Kit told me there had been an accident.’

  An accident? Stella stared at Kit. His eyes flashed a frantic, silent warning. Trust me. Danger! Please, trust me?

  Flatly, she said, ‘An accident, yes.’

  She no longer knew whom to trust. Gordon was nearest, almost within reach. His fear of the stone was a palpable thing but even so, he had stood up when Tony Bookless arrived and taken one more protective step towards her.

  Kit was not angry; he was miserable and caught up in something beyond his control. He was out of reach, stuck in the open away from the mound, swaying on his feet.

  Whatever his silent pleas, he and Tony Bookless had a common understanding. They were both moving now, edging round, slowly, absently, with no obvious place to go, except that Bookless came closer each time to Stella and the skull-stone and Kit further away.

  The stone gave no help. Here, so close to the end, it offered nothing but a desperate need to enter the tunnel of Weyland’s Smithy. The grave mound ached equally for her, as a lover might ache on the wrong side of a prison wall, seeing, but unable to embrace.