by Harper Fox
I went back to my work. I sat down, anyway, and I picked up the map I would have picked up if the phone hadn’t rung, and I glanced over the last notes I’d made. I wasn’t reacting badly, I thought. The migraine pills had a distancing effect sometimes, but still. I was admirably calm. Or despicably so. I couldn’t quite work out which. The only trouble was that everything I’d written for the last five hours, all my day’s ideas, seemed…
Hollow. A big dark splash appeared on the map I was studying. Swearing violently, I grabbed for a tissue. These maps, frail things on fine yellow parchment, were on loan to me from the Antiquities Department in strictest trust. I mopped the place where the ink was starting to run, and I swiped the tissue under my eyes to prevent further damage. Hollow Hill, the spidery inscription read. That was why the word had come into my mind. Hollow and empty, all my theories, not just today but ever since I’d chosen this stupid path for my life.
No, not Hollow. I held the map up to the desk lamp. This was why I didn’t let emotions get between me and my work. Already tears had blurred the evidence, like a century of rain on a tomb. The map was marked Hallow, I could see now. Hallow Hill.
Reflexes of interest fired. I didn’t think I cared anymore, but place-name analysis had become a kneejerk response. Hallow and hollow often got mixed up, in folklore as well as orthography. A hollow hill might be a memory of an Earth-goddess legend, something sacred in the belly of the land. It could be a barrow mound, or…
I flipped back a few pages in the notebook I carried round with me. My first night here, I’d followed my usual practice of taking up a place in the oldest village pub and letting it be known that I was fool enough to get in a round as the price for a good local tale. I’d been handed a beauty, a proper hairy old chestnut, complete with the usual assurance that my narrator knew the fellow concerned, or at least he’d been the friend of a friend. There once was a farmer, I deciphered from my rough shorthand notes. This farmer climbed down a crevasse searching for something he’d dropped, and he fell into a cave beneath the hill. He was lost and frightened in the dark, but then from nowhere he heard music and began to make out candlelight. He emerged into a cavern—and there, sound asleep in their magnificent thrones, was all King Arthur’s court, knights and ladies, and set out on a table before the king himself, a golden horn. The farmer had heard a story that whoever was bold enough to blow three blasts on this horn would waken the king and his court from their enchanted sleep. Boldly he blew the first blast, but when the courtiers began to stir, he took fright and ran, and afterwards could never find the place again.
I set the notebook down. Half an hour had somehow slithered by. As tales went, it was a wild one, and I hadn’t been planning to use it, though I’d made it worth the old chap’s time in terms of Newcastle Brown and packets of crisps from the bar. Maybe I’d have glanced over the maps to see if I could find a place to match the story. Maybe Piers and I would have taken a walk out on Christmas Day to have a look. He was always very patient about research. Always interested.
Hollow Hill, or Hallow Hill, looked to be near Sewingshields Crags, barely half a mile from the hotel. By the candlelight—and I’d pushed from my mind how Piers would look naked in it, long limbs ivory and gold—I could see the snow was falling still. It wasn’t the time for a field trip.
Then, what else had I to do? I was an experienced hand in the field, and far from stupid. The moon was full. There would be enough light. And I’d brought my kit with me—thermals, fleece jacket, waterproofs, hat. I’d be fine.
I got as far as picking up the jacket. Then the room seemed to close in on me, stiflingly hot. My breath caught in my throat. I shoved my feet into my walking boots and laced them up with hands that didn’t seem to belong to me. I was hyperventilating by the time I got the laces done, though I strove to keep my panicked breathing quiet. I just needed to get out. Shrugging into the jacket, I grabbed my room keys and headed for the door.
Chapter Two
The climb would be easy. I was almost disappointed. The few inches of snow that had fallen hadn’t concealed the footpath leading up from the road onto the moors. In fact it was clearer than usual, in the cloud-bronze light of the moon. She was high near the zenith, competing with snowflakes and stars for the night sky. Briefly I looked up and tried to meet her weary, ancient gaze. What are we up to now, then, Gavin?
Ma’am, I’m sure I’ve no idea.
No. That wasn’t true. I was off to investigate the possible scene of a relevant local myth. I could see Sewingshields lifting its stupendous hill-flank under the snow. The crags, sharp sheer granite cliffs, were on the far side. This was sill-and-fault country, where intruded bands of igneous rock turned the landscape to a frozen wave-troughed ocean as the sandstone around them eroded away. Ridges and huge dykes. How the kids on my school trips had laughed, and so had I, but I’d fallen in love as well. I’d have built my frontier here, if I’d been emperor. From habit, I thought myself into Hadrian’s skin, glanced around at my team of surveyors and made a mental gesture at the highest ridge of all. Yes. Up there.
It wasn’t far. I’d made the hike a dozen times in daylight. My goal was the very top crest of Sewingshields, which tonight looked both hollow and hallowed in the moon-glittered snow. That was the right place on the map, too. I was in business. I pushed my hands into my pockets, got my head down and started to walk.
Medieval maps weren’t great on scale, of course. You could walk a long way and not cover much distance on them. I stopped at the top of a long, slow hill that had robbed my lungs of breath. Sewingshields seemed just as far away as ever, and looking back, I couldn’t see the lights of the hotel. That was odd. The footpath I remembered was pretty much a long straight stretch up to the Wall.
I must have left the path. That was okay. I didn’t have a compass, but could orient myself easily by the crests of these well-known hills. I turned to do so, and the wind moaned, and the landscape vanished in a sudden rush of snow.
Great. I wasn’t dressed for a blizzard. Something self-preserving in me—perhaps only the memory of what Piers would say, if he found out I’d gone out at night so ill equipped—woke up, and told me to retrace my steps while I still had the chance.
Except I didn’t have any. Bewildered, I stared back the way I had come. All around me, for as far as I could see into the white-out, the snow was virgin, as deep and crisp and even as it had been for old Wenceslas on the night of his charity run. I might have been dropped here from space.
It was almost funny. I was twenty six years old, a toughened field investigator, hard as nails. My arse and my elbow were perfectly distinct from one another in my understanding. And I had turned round once—allowed myself to lose my sense of north—and I was lost, no more than half a mile from home. My hands and feet were going numb, my jacket starting to soak through. For God’s sake.
I could hear music. For an instant I was irritated. Tough to get peace anywhere, even in the most remote of ancient sites; you’d pull up by some standing stones in Cornwall or the Orkneys and there the other car would be, windows down, flapping a curtain of Radio One over the megaliths. Then it struck me that perhaps I really had gone wrong in my route, and wandered into the outskirts of a village, or—more embarrassingly still—doubled back to the hotel.
Not much harp music got airtime on Radio One. As soon as I’d decided that was what I was hearing, I became unsure. It was deeper than that, richer. When I tried to pinpoint its direction, it seemed to encircle me. For a moment I felt it as if it were coming from inside me, and then it was gone.
All right. Maybe Piers was right and I had been working too hard. When your dad puts in six nights a week at a shipyard steel factory, it’s hard to convince yourself that anything to do with books qualifies as work at all, but I hadn’t had much sleep lately. I wiped snow out of my eyes. I could see golden light.
Occam’s razor, Gav, I told myself sternly. Lights in a blizzard—even softly shifting aureoles like these—had plenty of mu
ndane causes before I went looking for strange phenomena. Yes, a village, or the hotel. Or maybe a gathering of travellers. It was pretty soon after solstice; maybe a chapter of Northumberland’s peculiar brand of hippie Hell’s Angels had made their way up here to worship the dragon of the ridge. They were a sinister lot, but that didn’t bother me. My notebooks and my easily assumed air of bumbling academia took me everywhere, and everybody liked to be asked for their stories. I was just a harmless bookworm. Of course they’d find out different if we got into a fight.
I made for the lights. I was ridiculously tired, and I didn’t understand how the snow could possibly have drifted thigh-high in the time that I’d been standing there lost. Making my way up the hill was almost impossible. Struggling, I let my mind retreat to the hotel room, the night I’d planned. Candlelight, a big double bed. The first time Piers and I had shared either. We made love in brief fierce bursts. Standing up in his office if I tracked him down there between lectures, awkwardly on the bruising little sofa in my rooms, anywhere fast and painful enough for his scruples not to find us. Well, I’d had enough of that. Time to do this right, I’d told him, packing my bags for this trip. I’d been smiling, trying to keep it light. He was so bloody earnest, so attentive, you had to be careful how you spoke to him. Tell your family, then come out and join me for Christmas. Come on, lover. Now or never.
The snow turned to powder and vanished from under my feet. There was an instant’s starry freefall, then a red-black impact that put my world to sleep.
My head hurt. In the golden light—a coalescence of the drifting orbs I’d seen on the surface, as if they had been heralds, promises—I saw that my hands were grazed. I lifted one to touch my brow and it came away scarlet.
This didn’t concern me. The pain was almost refreshing by contrast with the dull thud of a migraine, and I could work through almost anything once my interest was engaged. You might say that it had found a focus now. I sat up, silent laughter shaking me. I’d crashed down into hallowed Hollow Hill. I was, of course, concussed or insane. A narrow ledge had broken my fall, and from this perch, I could look down into the golden cavern.
Where did the light come from? I couldn’t pinpoint a source, and my mind briefly worked on that, seeking a rational problem to solve. All I could conclude was that the air itself was aglow, and that didn’t help, so I veered off. All right. I leaned a shoulder against the rock beside me. Sick pain grabbed me—the joint was dislocated at best—but I couldn’t spare attention for it. I had a hallucination to watch. It was a cracker, as well. I wouldn’t have thought I’d had it in me. I settled in, pulling my jacket round me as best I could.
Guinevere was sitting alone and apart. I nodded. Yes, this was right. She didn’t look lonely. She was magnificent, and not in the fair-maiden style. She occupied her massive carved-oak throne, as stately and solid as the wood of its construction. She was dressed in homespun and sheepskin robe, and she was heavily pregnant. If she opened her eyes, she would command the room with a glance. If she smiled, the sun would come out, even underground. Maybe the air was alight with her dreams. The legends of her infidelity to Arthur, her hopeless love for Lancelot and the miserable price all three of them had paid, were punitive Christian froth. She was the earth, the land; no king could reign except through her. She chose the man she wanted, whichever could quicken her womb.
I laughed, surprising myself with the sudden happy sound. There was a table—not a round one, charming though that concept was; no efficient Iron Age chieftain would dispense with his hierarchical authority and call his vassal lords his equals. No, this was a plain table, solid and long. On benches around it sat a dozen sturdy warriors. Hungrily I studied their garments, clicking piece to piece together in my mind, seeking a date. No flowing silks or cumbersome plated armour. Leather jerkins, sheepskins, the odd piece of—yes, chainmail, rusted but carefully preserved, legacy perhaps from someone’s Roman grandfather. These men looked as ready to jump into battle as settle down for dinner. Even in sleep, grizzled heads resting on work-calloused hands, they exuded readiness.
I forgot that I was dreaming. I scrambled down from my ledge, slithering on loose stones. This was real. All my theories were borne out, and if I came a little closer, if I dared look, my fantasy would unite with them. Two of the men at the table—at the far end, one proudly occupying its head, the other close by his right hand—were younger than the others. The strange light gleamed on their hair. They were beautiful. Their hands were clasped on the tabletop, as if in the last moment before eternal sleep they had reached for one another.
I came to a halt. There on the table lay a golden horn, just as in the tale of the knitting shepherd. That had just appeared, I was pretty sure. The table was otherwise bare and I would have noticed it. But my barriers were crashing, a lifetime’s worth of defensive cynicism melting, and anyway this horn was hardly mysterious, not a medieval herald’s trumpet. It looked as if it had been on a ram’s head many long centuries ago, and the gold on it was crude, just some banding round the base.
A sacred object nonetheless. If I lifted it, put it to my lips, a sound would come from it, I knew. If I just did it now without thinking, even my twenty-first century lungs with their load of free radicals would deliver one breath of music, one clear note to wake the sleepers. I put out my hand.
So this was blind faith. A chill ran through me. I was as bad as Piers, wasn’t I—brought to a childish, mindless halt, not by a priest turning wine into blood in a Catholic church but by my own need for miracles. I’d never succumbed to it. My mind was my own. I was free.
The lights went out. My hand went down through empty air and I fell to my knees in the dark.
Piers!
Had I called his name out loud? If not, I soon would: my throat was full of frightened sobbing and I clamped my mouth shut to halt the reaction. All I could think about, scrabbling in my pockets for a torch, was the infinite comfort of his arms around me. If he hurried through our sexual encounters, he’d never stinted me on that.
I understood the value of it just in the instant of remembering I’d lost it forever. And that was the kicker, wasn’t it? Sex I could probably get anywhere. Nothing and nobody could ever reproduce Piers’ embrace; I’d felt it for the last time.
I found the torch. That was a good thing, but I didn’t want to switch it on. I knelt there in the pitch-black for a time I measured in the fractured rasp of my breathing, the thud of my heart, slowing from its exalted pounding to the pace it would need when I switched on the beam. A stolid plodding beat to keep it going in a hollow world.
Hollow and empty, yes. The torch had survived my fall and the batteries were good. The beam probed easily to the cavern’s far wall, meeting no obstacles. Of course. There was no legendary king asleep beneath the earth, not here or in any of the other places where his name resounded. Glastonbury, Cadbury, Tintagel, all vacant. I’d been on a fool’s errand for the last six years—all my life, if I thought about it. There was no undying romance of Arthur and Lancelot, except in my own still-bleeding, migraine-racked head.
And no way out.
I didn’t accept that straight away. If I was a writer by trade, nature had blessed me with a Tyneside shipbuilder’s DNA, and I was made of tough stuff. In one last-ditch effort to persuade my dad there was a point to my existence, I’d tried out for the army, and got through all the physical tests easily enough, only stopping when a canny recruitment sergeant had dug through the stiff-necked exterior to the frustrated academic underneath. My dad had given up on me at that point, but it was better to find out in Wrekenton than Basra, and I’d kept up the fitness. I clambered back up the rock face to the ledge. I couldn’t have fallen too far or I’d have worse problems than a dislocated shoulder. Shining the torch up into the cavern roof, however, I could see no trace of a gap, no glimmer of night sky. I sucked a finger and held it out. One side of it chilled faintly, indicating a movement of air. I stumbled in that direction as far as the confines of the chamber would l
et me, but if there was a vent into the cave, it must be tiny, deep in one of the niches that ran off into darkness, not even wide enough to admit a hand.
I began to grow tired. The numb ache of the dislocated joint became a ferocious throb. I quartered the cavern as logically as I could, then I went and sat down on a rock that was roughly in the place where my hallucinated Lancelot had kept his place at the king’s right hand. A lovely sleeping warrior, abandoned to his dreams, dark curls shining. His head had been inclined almost onto Arthur’s shoulder. He had looked a lot like Piers.
If I gave this any more thought, I would cry, and that was no good. That would mean I’d surrendered to the idea of being lost down here, on a Christmas Eve in the wilderness where nobody would notice I was missing until probably well into January. I’d kept myself proudly independent since the breach with my family. Tell someone when you’re due home, all the guide books said. Piers had said it too, times past counting. But the only person I could tell who gave a damn was him. No, I wouldn’t fall apart like a lost kid. Even superbly alone here as I was, I couldn’t bear the shame of that, and so I sat myself up on my rock, drew a deep breath and switched the torch off to conserve its batteries. I shut my eyes, too. Better to choose the dark.
A great tide of sleepiness took me. It was almost pleasant. A good alternative, certainly, to desolation. I knew what was happening, of course. I had to get up and walk around, or…
Or what? Suddenly I couldn’t remember. What was so important about forcing my tired limbs into motion? Whose world would end if the blood started slowing in my veins? It didn’t hurt. I wished I cared more. I wished to God I hadn’t lost Piers.