"Speak for yourself," Laura sulked.
"And what is expected of us?" Church said, although the answer was obvious.
Shavi moistened his lips. "To oppose the powers that threaten to drive humanity into the shadows. To shine a beacon of hope in the night. Whatever the cost."
"Plain English," Veitch interjected. "To overthrow the bastards or die trying."
Ruth raised her eyes and muttered, "Thank you, John Wayne."
They all fell silent for a long moment, and it was Laura who gave voice to the thought on all their minds. "Look at us. What can we do?"
"I can give you all the cliches," Church began. "David and Goliath. The ant that moved several times its own weight-"
"Okay." Laura smiled falsely. "Now let's talk about the real world."
"There's some way out there," Veitch said adamantly. "We don't have to go out in a blaze of glory like the Wild Bunch. There's guerrilla warfare. There's-"
"— different rules now," Church said. "Powers out there we can use. Like the artefacts we uncovered." He still felt troubled that objects of such great power were in the hands of such an unpredictable race as the Tuatha De Danann.
"Guerrilla warfare," Ruth said. "I like that. We turn our weakness into a strength. Move fast, strike hard and be away before they can respond."
"Excuse me? Are we living in the same world?" Laura said. "These are things that can crush us faster than you can get on a high horse."
"Get a spine." Ruth turned to the others. "We all know what's going to happen next."
Every head dropped as one.
"Somebody's got to say it-"
"Let's not, and say we did." Laura tried to make out it was more sour humour, but they all heard the faint undertone in her voice: fear.
Ruth looked around the circle slowly. "They're going to try to bring Balor back. If we don't try to stop them-"
"Why us?" Laura no longer made any pretence of humour.
"But that is why we have been brought together," Shavi said quietly. "That is the reason why we contain this nebulous thing called the Pendragon Spirit, this thing that none of us truly understands. But it has been gifted to us so we can defend the land against this overwhelming threat."
Laura winced. "If you can believe all that-"
"You don't believe it?" Veitch asked sharply.
"You know what? I don't feel any different to before I met all you. You're just fooling yourselves, playing at being heroes. We're normal. Some of us, worse than normal. Weak, pathetic little shits. And the only time you're going to realise what a fantasy it is, is that second before you die in a gutter." Her features were flinty; it was obvious she wasn't going to back down.
There was a long period of silence filled only with the crackle of the fire. Then Tom began slowly, "It is all right to be scared of Balor. This is not some Fomorii like Calatin or Mollecht, who are frightening, but within our power to beat. As the Fomorii are to us, so Balor is to the Fomorii. He is their god, the embodiment of darkness, evil, death, chaos…" He shook his head slowly. "He is more than a force of nature, he is an abstract given form: destruction. You only have my word for this, but I can see from your faces your fear goes beyond what I say. Because you know. In the furthest reaches of your worst nightmare, in the dimmest purview of your race memory, in your primal fear of the night, he lives. If Balor returns, it truly will be the end of everything."
No one spoke. They listened to the wind whistling across the hills of Skye and somehow it seemed harsher, colder, the night too dark.
"Then we really do have no choice," Church said.
Laura turned away so the fire didn't light her face.
"How are they going to bring him back?" Ruth asked finally.
"None of those ancient races truly die," Tom said. "They flitter out of this existence for a while. Time is meaningless, space insignificant. They simply need to be anchored and dragged back." He shrugged. "How? I have no idea. Some ritual using the powerful distillation they have been amassing which we saw in Salisbury and under Dartmoor."
"Then we've got to stop the bastards before they start the ritual." There was an innocent optimism in Veitch's voice that raised all their spirits slightly.
"But where will they be doing it? And when?" Ruth asked.
"The when I can answer," Tom said. "The ritual of birthing will not be conducted until the next auspicious date when there is a conjunction of power and intent. What the Celts named the feast of Lughnasadh, the Harvest Festival. August 1."
"Three months." Church mulled over this for a second or two. "Doesn't seem very long. But we managed the unthinkable by our last deadline-"
"With no time to spare," Tom cautioned. "This task is far, far harder. The essence of Balor will already be contained in the birthing medium, ready for the ritual, and the Fomorii will have it hidden in their deepest, most inaccessible stronghold. To them, this thing is more valuable than anything in existence. Imagine if you held the spirit of your God? How much would you fight to protect it?"
"Do you think they've got it at that fortress we saw them building in the Lake District?" Ruth asked.
Tom shook his head. "It will be somewhere none of their enemies will have seen, beneath ground, certainly, and protected against all eventuality."
The wind came howling down from Sgurr Alasdair high in the Cuillin Hills, whipping up the fire so the sparks roared skywards like shooting stars. Looking up into the vast arc of the heavens, they felt suddenly insignificant, all their plans hopeless.
"Then how are we going to find it?" Ruth asked. "If they've gone to such great pains to make it safe for them, we're not just going to stumble across it."
Tom nodded in agreement; slowly, thoughtfully. "We need guidance. There is a place we could go, a ritual I could conduct-"
"Then let's do it as soon as possible." Church looked around at their faces; they were watching him with such intensity it made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't want the responsibility they were forcing on his shoulders.
"So you've decided, then." Laura's expression hid whatever she was thinking. "We've been lucky so far." Her hand went unconsciously to the scars on her face. "If you can call barely surviving luck. But sooner or later someone's going to die, and I don't intend it to be me."
"No one wants-" But she had risen and marched off into the night before Church had a chance to finish. He sighed and waved his hand dismissively. "We better get some sleep. We can start at first light."
Veitch and Shavi headed off to their tents while Tom lit a joint from his rapidly diminishing block of hash and wandered off beyond the light of the campfire.
Ruth sat down next to Church, slipping a tentative arm around his shoulders to give him a comforting squeeze. "No rest for the wicked."
"No rest for anyone." Church sighed. "I wish I had some Sinatra to play. He always makes me feel good at a time like this." Overhead a meteor shower set pinpricks of light flashing in the black gulf. "You remember when we sat in that cafe after we first got dragged into all this under Albert Bridge? You asked me if I was scared. I didn't even know what the word meant then. Now every morning when I wake up, it hits me from a hundred different directions: fear of screwing up again, fear of dying, fear that the world doesn't make sense any more, that there's no secure place anywhere." He paused a second before continuing, "Fear of what this nightmare means on some kind of spiritual level. That there is no meaning. That we're just here as prey for whatever things are higher up the food chain than us. Fear that the whole mess doesn't even end with death."
"You think too much." Ruth gave him another squeeze before removing her arm. "That morning in the cafe? It seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? I barely knew you then."
Church looked up, unable to pinpoint the tone in her voice. She was smiling, her eyes bright in the dying firelight.
"I think you should look for meaning in the small picture, not the big one," she continued. "It seems stupid with all the upset and suffering, but on that micro leve
l my life is better now than it ever was before. I was in a job I hated, just going through the motions because I knew it would have made my dad happy, not really having any idea who I was at all. Now everything in my life seems heightened, somehow. Even the smallest thing has passion in it. You know I'm not one to get poetic, but compared to how I live my life now, I was dead before. Maybe that's where the meaning lies."
"Maybe," he answered noncommittally, but he knew what she meant.
"And I feel like my life's been enriched for knowing you and the others. I feel closer even to the ones I don't particularly like than anyone I knew before. Maybe when the rulebook was redrawn, the dictionary was too." She laughed at her metaphor.
"What do you mean?"
"I know what friendship means now." Her smile slowly faded until her features were sadly introspective. "I don't know how to say this, but at this point, with all that shit lying ahead, it seems important."
"So what does friendship mean?" He tried to raise the mood with a smile.
"It means being prepared to lay down your life for someone."
"If we're careful, that's something we won't even have to think-"
"Church, be realistic. If we go into this, we're not all, maybe not any of us, going to come out of it alive. You know that. Don't insult me by pretending it's not true."
He was hypnotised by what he saw in her eyes.
"You've changed too," she continued. "You've grown in a lot of ways, in just a few short weeks."
"Yeah, well, you know how it is. Pressure is the catalyst for change."
"It's a shame we have to lose our innocence." Although she said we, Church felt she was talking about him.
"You can't stay innocent and face up to sacrifice and death and war. Those bastards killed my innocence when they arranged for Marianne to die. To forge my character," he added with a sneer.
"You mustn't let it eat you up."
"I won't. I let that happen before, when I thought I was somehow complicit in Marianne's suicide. It's not going to happen again. I'm going to find whoever killed Marianne and I'm going to get my revenge, but I won't be consumed by it. This is different. It's colder, harder." He could tell she wasn't happy about what his words implied about the change in his character, but on this subject he didn't care. "I'm not stupid. I've read the classics and I know how revenge destroys people. But for the kind of suffering that's been caused to all of us, there has to be some kind of payback."
The fire was starting to die down and a chill crept across the campsite, belying the summer that was just around the corner.
"What's to become of us all?" Ruth said with a troubled smile.
It was a rhetorical question, but Church felt the need to answer it nonetheless. "We'll do the best we can and damn the consequences."
The morning was clear and fresh. The fires on the mainland had mostly burned themselves out, but there was still the occasional tendril of smoke snaking up into the blue sky. Shavi was the first to rise and he immediately went to the sea wall to survey the stretch of water that separated Skye from the blackened ruins that remained of the Kyle of Lochalsh. Returning to the camp as the others prepared breakfast, he announced that the serpent which had patrolled the waters seemed to have departed with the Fomorii presence. Only Ruth caught the glimmer of relief in his face.
After they had eaten an unappetising breakfast of muesli and water, they found a boat on the sea front and Tom steered it across the strait to where they had abandoned their van the previous day. By 10 a.m., they were on their way north along deserted main roads. Ten miles outside of the Kyle of Lochalsh, they saw a farmer attending to hedges away on a hillside, and the further they progressed the more signs of life they encountered, until it seemed the devastation they had encountered was just an aberration.
When they stopped at a pub in Achnasheen for lunch, they were chased away by the landlord and some irate locals. The explanation came at an old-fashioned garage further along the road. When the owner shuffled out to fill their tank, checked cap raised over a ruddy face, he told them of a rumour circulating in the area that the Government's imposition of martial law and the censorship of the media was to prevent panic because a plague was loose in the country; what kind of plague, no one was quite sure. He didn't believe it himself. The view among his own particular group was that the "bastard politicians" had finally been overcome by their innate corruption and were using a manufactured crisis as a smokescreen to get rid of the democratic process. It had all started with the gun laws, he said. The tragedy at Dunblane was the excuse, but the weapons had really been controlled to prevent an armed uprising. But, he said conspiratorially, a few landowners had held on to their shotguns and were stockpiling them for use "when the soldiers come." At this, he decided he had said too much and took their money in silence before retreating to his dusty shack.
The further north they travelled, the more the people seemed to be untroubled by everything that was happening. They stopped at one farm for supplies of milk, bacon and eggs, only to discover the farmer's wife who served them knew nothing of the martial law. "We don't have a telly," she said in her thick Highlands accent, "and we're too busy to listen to the radio."
The final leg of the journey took them on a road that was straight as a die through the Beinn Eighe nature reserve, where pine trees and gorse clustered hard against the road. The wildness of this no man's land made them all uncomfortable; they felt as if humanity had been driven out by an angry, hateful nature for all the crimes it had committed; the new occupants were more respectful of nature's rules, and unforgiving of anyone who dared venture back into that dark, green domain. Sometimes strange movements could be glimpsed among the shadows beneath the trees; occasionally the quietness was disturbed by cries that came from no bird or animal they could recognise.
The oppressiveness eased slightly when the road took them along the banks of Loch Maree, which was so clear and still it looked like the sky had been brought down to earth. The scenery all around was breathtaking. Across the loch, the banks rose up sharply to soaring, rocky hillsides which were dappled by purple cloud shadows interspersed with brilliant patches of sunlight. From the top, white waterfalls cascaded down gloriously.
Soon after they arrived at Gairloch, a small fishing village perched on the edge of a sheltered sea loch. It was a balmy late afternoon with the seagulls screeching overhead and the smell of the day's catch mingling with the salty aroma of seaweed all along the harbour front. Boats sat up on trailers everywhere, but only the gentle lapping of the waves disturbed the lazy atmosphere.
After parking the van overlooking a tiny jetty, Veitch clambered out and stretched his muscles before turning to survey the thickly wooded slopes all around. "I thought we were driving up to the bloody top of the world. Who the hell are we supposed to be seeing up here?"
Ruth turned her face to the warmth of the sun. "Come on, Tom. You've kept us in suspense all day."
"You know, the old git only does it because he knows if he tells us everything we'll dump him in the nearest rest home." Laura adjusted her sunglasses, studiously avoiding Tom's fierce glare.
"You'll wait until the time's right," he said icily. "If you had a little patience and started listening a little more, you might actually gain a little wisdom. We won't be doing anything until sunset so you may as well make yourself busy."
They unloaded the camping equipment and split it between them before setting off on foot along a valley that ran up into the hills. They walked for two hours until they were exhausted, continually scanning among the trees for any sign of danger. When they broke above the treeline they pitched camp on the sunlit, grassy slopes, admiring the amazing views across the wildly beautiful countryside. After lighting a fire Shavi cooked the bacon and eggs and prepared beans on toast for Laura, which they devoured hungrily after their exertion.
Tom avoided all their questions in his usual irritatingly brusque manner until the sun started to ease towards the horizon, and then he marshalled
them and led them across the slopes and around rocky outcroppings where the only sound was the whistle of the wind. Finally they mounted a bank and looked down on the remnants of a stone circle.
It was only identifiable as a henge at close inspection; to the cursory observer the arrangement of rocks looked almost natural, an illusion that was added to by the few recumbent stones which had not survived the passing of the centuries. Set on the grassy plain, with a vista across the forested landscape towards the setting sun, they could fully understand why their ancestors had located it in that spot; there was a sense of awe from simply being there with only nature all around. A respectful silence came over them the instant they laid eyes on it and, automatically, they all bowed their heads in respect. When they were just a few feet away, Church dipped down and stretched out his fingers to the short grass. A blue spark leapt up from the earth to his fingertips and disappeared up his arm.
"It's true," Ruth said. "Can you feel it?"
Shavi closed his eyes and put his head back beatifically. "Yes. The earth power. "
"A few weeks ago I didn't feel a thing in any of these old sites. Now I've got a tingling in my legs, my hands." Ruth looked round curiously. "A feeling of-"
"Well-being," Tom interrupted. "The Pendragon Spirit within you has grown stronger through your experiences. The spirit and the earth power come from the same source. Naturally, you sense an affinity."
"If the spirit inside us grows stronger, where will it end?" Shavi asked with an expression of wonder.
Tom smiled enigmatically. "Millennia ago, when the blue fire pulsed through the arteries of the earth, all men experienced what you feel now. And perhaps they will again. Once you have awakened the sleeping king."
They processed into the centre of the circle and looked around. All was silent apart from the breeze humming in their ears. The sun was fat and scarlet on the horizon, about to tip below the distant hills, the sky red at the lowest point, merging through purple to dark blue.
Darkest hour aom-2 Page 6