by Juliana Gray
So the Lady remained hidden in the cliffs by the shore, attended only by the Beast, who had also come ashore to protect his sister in the absence of her beloved. Their days passed quietly in the heat of the late summer, and as the time for harvest approached, and the nights grew longer, and the babe began to quicken in the Lady’s womb, the two of them watched the horizon for the approach of the Hero’s ships.
But the long weeks came and went, and the air grew cool, and still no black sail appeared over the edge of the sea to answer the Lady’s hopes. Their stores of food, though carefully husbanded, began to dwindle, until at last nothing remained of the supplies the Hero had left behind for the nourishment of his Lady.
One morning the Beast said, ‘I will disguise my monstrous form under a cloak and hood, and I will take this gold bracelet into the nearest village and exchange it for bread and meat. But you must hide yourself carefully while I am gone, and do not reveal your face to any man until I return, for we know not what dangers may lie around us . . .’
THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)
Twenty
A scream rang out, which I recognized as my own, calling Mr. Higganbotham to my aid.
But he did not reply, and in the next instant, I launched myself desperately in the direction of the pistol, reaching with both hands to dislodge it from the man’s grip. He was motioning to the landlord, and did not notice my movement for the first split second. He turned his head, and I had just grasped the air, inches from the pistol, when he brought it up and down heavily on my shoulder, sending me spinning to the dirt floor.
The impact stunned me, and I have only the most confused recollection of the next few seconds. There was a struggle of some kind, a short argument in Greek, and as I attempted to rise, a strong hand closed around my arm, jerking me upward.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The man replied with another jerk, dragging me outside into the swirl of the wind, where Mr. Higganbotham stood stiff under the pressure of an arm locked about his throat. The arm belonged to a stout, well-muscled man, clean-shaven, whose skin was quite pale except for a few incongruous freckles across the bridge of his nose, and whose hair burst forth from his head in a shock of ginger.
The two men signaled to each other. “What’s going on?” I gasped out to Mr. Higganbotham, and my captor shoved the pistol into the small of my back, urging me forward toward the edge of the cliffs.
The other man released his hold on Mr. Higganbotham’s neck and prodded the poor man with a large fist. “Get going!” he growled, in a rough American accent, and Mr. Higganbotham stumbled forward to my side.
As we started on in tandem, encouraged by the butt of the pistol, he said to me, somewhat scratchily, “I gather it’s an ambush.”
As it happened, I had some experience with ambushes. One can hardly avoid them, as a young and unattached female in a massive household such as that of the Duke of Olympia. Their Graces did their best to protect me, of course, and I soon learned how to protect myself. How to maneuver against the unexpected capture. I developed the instincts of a deer, vigilant and suspicious: vigilant especially against those who laid the more artful snare, the one baited with my particular weakness.
But I had also once been caught, and I learned from this painful entrapment the most valuable lesson of all.
You must not, at first, attempt to break free. You must bide your time. You must lie in wait, just as he has; you must gather your strength for the moment when his own defenses have softened, and he is not expecting a blow.
When at last you strike back, your engagement must be total.
Of course, I could not explain this principle to Mr. Higganbotham, as we stumbled along the darkening path toward the edge of the cliffs, whipped by the African wind and by the stern commands of our captors. But it didn’t matter; he seemed to have accepted his defeat, and went along by my side, rubbing his abused neck from time to time, and clearing his throat of both dust and abrasion. I noticed he was limping, but I could not tell whether this came as a result of some wound, or because of the miles of uneven road over which we had passed today.
“Why, where’s the landlord?” I asked suddenly, because I had just realized he was missing.
“Ah, yes. I believe I saw—” He cleared his throat again, for his voice remained raspy, as if he had swallowed a number of sharp pebbles. “Believe I saw him bolt past, just before the spots appeared before my eyes. And then you, with the big fellow and the pistol.”
We spoke in low tones, though the two men were right behind us and could, I suppose, have understood what we said.
“How did it happen?”
“Why, I don’t properly know. One moment I was straining to catch up with you, because I didn’t like the look of that shed he was hustling you into, and the next moment I had someone’s arm about my neck.” He rubbed it again.
“Hey!” said the man with the pistol. “Shut the f—— up, do you hear?”
“Sir!” Mr. Higganbotham exclaimed. “There’s no need for that sort of—”
A blow landed on the back of his shoulder; I am not sure which man delivered it.
“—in front of a lady,” Mr. Higganbotham finished, in a sulky mutter.
We rounded the curve of the headland, and the bright sea spread out before us, held in place by a pale and aging sky. By now, I no longer noticed the marine scent of the air, but as we approached the cliffs, the brine began to tickle my nose anew, together with the desert dust. The slow crash of the waves struck against the rocks below, and to the left stretched a gigantic golden beach, nurtured into magnificence by the shelter of the ancient headland.
A hand nudged mine. “Look there,” whispered Mr. Higganbotham.
“Where?”
“The sea.”
I lifted my gaze to the flat horizon, and at first I didn’t see anything, except the white-laced heave of the water under the scirocco’s hand.
And then an object moved, in tandem with the waves, and I realized it was a ship: a long, graceful craft, perhaps a half mile out to sea, trailing a faint smudge of white smoke from the funnel at the center of its upper deck.
My lips moved. Isolde, I said silently.
But what was she doing here, so far from her station on the western side of the island? Right here, at the exact spot where we made our way along the edge of the headland, along a path that now sloped downward, as if to reach the shore itself?
And—my God!—how could we win her attention?
It was the worst kind of agony. I returned my gaze to the path before me, but my eyes kept shifting quietly northward, to the instrument of our salvation hovering nearby, metal-clad and mighty, so tantalizingly close and yet as far away as the moon.
I could not signal. Anything I did would bring instant retribution from our captors, and—worse—would reveal the ship’s proximity, and possibly even our relation to it. We might be dead before a boat could even be readied for our rescue.
I could only hope that someone’s glass was trained upon this shore. That the Isolde’s appearance here was not a coincidence.
The path was now barely that. We were forced into single file as the track narrowed to perhaps twenty-four inches, along the throat of the old man embodied in the rocks, while the sea washed his collar fifty or more feet below. The spray stung the tender skin of my cheek and fell upon my lips. I licked them and tasted salt, and I realized I was horribly thirsty.
I walked in front, measuring my steps carefully, for the trail was strewn with small rocks. I no longer looked out to sea; the traverse demanded my full attention. To my left, the cliff dropped vertiginously away. I had been clutching the medallion in my pocket, but now I released the talisman and lifted my right palm to steady myself against the rock face as we descended.
“Where are we going?” I shouted back boldly, over my shoulder, because the two men could not po
ssibly do any worse to us.
“I said, shut the f——up!”
I planted my feet and made a half turn. “I refuse to go any farther—”
But the blast of a pistol cut off my words, shattering the rock nearby. A spray of tiny shrapnel stung the back of my neck.
“Next time,” the man said, “I’ll be aiming at your f——ing head. Or his.”
“I say—!” began Mr. Higganbotham, shocked.
“Just another fifty feet,” said the other man. “You’ll see it.”
My ears rang; my body shook. The sting at my neck turned into a trickle that traveled down my collar. I turned, almost unable to breathe, and moved my wobbling legs another step, and another, though my head swam and my vision had reduced to a narrow tunnel.
“You’re bleeding,” said Mr. Higganbotham.
“I’m all right.” A little courage returned to me as I uttered the words.
The path made a slight turn inward, revealing a wider section, flat and overhung by a large ledge that I realized must be the man’s nose. As we reached this shelter, an opening became visible in the rock face beneath the ledge, rather like a nostril.
“Here we are,” said the man with the pistol. “In we go.”
“In here?”
“You heard me, didn’t you? Or are you deaf? Get going.” He waved the pistol.
I looked at Mr. Higganbotham’s pale face, and again at the pistol. I hardly dared glance at the faces of the men who drove us, but then I didn’t need to; their hard glares bore down upon us, filled with a will and determination I could not begin to comprehend.
The caves, the landlord had said. The caves of the legend. But surely a myth of three thousand years’ distance had no power to lure men into murder. What was the inducement? Was there perhaps a treasure of some kind hidden inside?
“I don’t understand—” I began.
“For f——’s sake!” he roared. “You don’t need to understand! Just go in the f——ing cave, and shut your mouth.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I whispered. “Tell me whether Lord Silverton is inside. Tell me if he’s alive.”
His aimed the pistol at the crown of Mr. Higganbotham’s head. “Go!”
I turned and ducked into the cave.
I sensed a third presence in the cave well before the pulse of Mr. Higganbotham’s breathing had lapsed into somnolence, but I said nothing. The poor man had been subject to shocks enough today.
In fact, our prison was rather more comfortable than I might have expected from an opening in a cliff face, miles from any civilized encampment. Mr. Higganbotham presently snored beneath a pair of thick woolen blankets, and two more lay across my own shoulders, as I stared into the blackness and listened to the distant percussion of the sea. The floor was covered with straw, reasonably clean, and we had eaten bread and drunk water. I had even been allowed a moment of relief, in a private crevice of rock that seemed perfectly designed for such an emergency.
So my pulse soon returned to a semblance of its ordinary rhythm, and I lay on my makeshift couch counting its beats while I waited for Mr. Higganbotham to enter the deepest chasm of his sleep. I had no personal inclination for slumber. Each time I closed my eyes, the unaccountable ache swelled in my breast, as if some foreign person had taken advantage of this vulnerability to slip inside my skin, to wriggle herself inside me like fingers into a glove, transferring her own urgency into mine. My hands turned cold and trembled, and my lips moved in the shape of someone’s name—Silverton, perhaps?—and I opened my eyes again and thought, I must find him.
I must find him.
“I don’t mean to say I told you so,” began Her Majesty.
“But you will, nonetheless.”
“Did I not warn you against this expedition, from its very inception? Did I not caution you at every turn? And still you would not heed me. Oh, no. Sensible Miss Truelove knows best, doesn’t she? She can manage herself perfectly, all on her own. Clever girl.”
I turned my head in the direction of the voice. At the corner of the chamber hovered a faint glow, in the center of which I could just make out the outline of her small and queenly figure. “I must beg you to whisper,” I said.
“He is fast asleep, I assure you.”
“Nonetheless. He has borne enough already, considering how innocently he has entered into our investigation.”
“He cannot hear me.”
“He can hear me, replying to you.”
Her Majesty stumbled upon my logic and pursed her lips. The glow around her shifted in tint, from blue to very faintly red.
I turned my head back to the space above. “And I’m sure the guard outside isn’t asleep, is he?”
No answer.
I closed my eyes and let out a long and vaporous breath. “Why did you come? Only to castigate me for my foolishness?”
She said grudgingly, “I suppose your intentions were noble.”
“Thank you for that.”
“But you have got yourself in a wretched muddle, haven’t you? Do you have any notion of trying to escape?”
“I have been trusting that the opportunity might arise, at some point, if I remain vigilant.”
The Queen made one of her little harrumphing noises. For some reason, the sound gave me comfort. So predictable, in this strange and perilous corner of the globe, into which fate and foolishness had led me.
“Do you have any notion what’s happened to Lord Silverton, perhaps?” I said. “Since you are fortunate to possess such extraordinary powers of perception.”
“Ha! Can it be? Are you actually allowing that I might represent something more than your own fevered imagination? This is progress indeed.”
“I am only grasping at whatever hope remains to me.”
She made another noise, much softer, and for a moment there was only silence between us, beating its slow wings. I became aware of another light floating against the rock above me, blue again, as faint and transparent as a child’s dream, and it seemed that the tide of brutal longing receded an inch or two. I thought, It doesn’t matter if she’s real or not. She is here.
When she spoke again, the tone of her voice had also softened, though the vowels remained as imperious as ever. “My dear, I have only ever wanted what is best for you. I have only ever wanted your happiness.”
“My happiness, for the moment, is most intimately bound with the survival of my companions.”
She sighed. “I thought as much.”
I felt as if I were choking. I turned on my side to relieve the pressure, and said, “Can you not give me a hint of some kind? Do you not even care what becomes of him?”
“Not particularly. He is nothing to me. It is you who matter.”
“But why?” I spoke a little too loudly, and from the opposite wall of the cave, a few yards away, Mr. Higganbotham stirred. “Why do I matter to you? Why do you insist on persecuting me like this?”
The Queen said sharply, “That is our own concern.”
I was too angry to reply. I closed my eyes, this time with determination, and pushed with all my might, forcing everything out, every tingling awareness, every thought and sensation and perversity, until I lay limply under my blanket, a hollow sack, empty of all my power.
After all, there was nothing I could do. I lay imprisoned in a dark, damp cave on the edge of the sea, blind, exhausted. I had no weapon, no insight into my condition, no idea even why I was being held prisoner.
I believe I must have drifted into sleep, for I next experienced a sense of awakening, though I have no memory of any dream. The Queen was gone, the trace of her spirit quite extinguished, and yet I still perceived, when I opened my eyes, a transparent blue glow floating against the rocky ceiling.
I lay quite still—I had turned on my back, it seemed, during the time I was insensible—and regarded this h
int of radiance for several minutes. I still possessed a feeling of comfortable and blessed emptiness, each muscle quite slack beneath the two thick blankets, which seemed to pin me to the earth as efficiently as an anvil, and my unusual calmness of mind made every sense acute.
Something had woken me, I realized. A sound.
I waited patiently, because I had no choice. I had lost all will to move. My hands and feet were too warm, my limbs too loose.
Tap tap tap.
There it was, almost too faint for human ears, regular and metallic.
I went on staring at the dim radiance above me. I thought, I will wait until I hear it again, and then it came, just above the whoosh of Mr. Higganbotham’s sleeping breath: Tap tap tap.
As I heard the sound, I realized that the glow on the ceiling was not uniform. If I watched carefully, if indeed I absorbed the sense of the glow rather than watched it, I became aware that it was concentrated—if a light so transparent can be said to concentrate—on that corner of the cave near which the Queen had earlier been sitting.
And if I transferred the whole of my attention to that corner of the cave, I observed that the light produced just enough illumination to disclose a series of regular ruts ascending the cave’s wall, ending in black shadow.
I blinked several times and narrowed my eyes, because I wasn’t quite sure that I had really seen this extraordinary pattern, or whether it was simply a trick of the light. The closer I peered, however, the fainter the glow became, until at last it winked out entirely and left the cave in darkness.
I thought, I will not get up. I cannot get up.
I was too tired, and the cave was utterly dark, and it was all an illusion in any case.
Tap tap tap.
This time I noticed—quite against my will to notice—that the sound came from the strange anomalous corner of the cave, and if I were completely honest with myself, I had to acknowledge that the sound drifted down from above.
From the black shadow on the rock ceiling.