Corbenic

Chapter Twenty-four

Fair son, this castle is yours.

High History of the Holy Grail

He bought some food and spent a few hours sleeping in the corner of a grassy graveyard outside the church in the main street. Although he’d had some rest at Shadow’s his whole body still seemed weary, as if the time in the Waste Land, the time that had not existed, was catching him up. And he was thin. Worn thin.

The first thing he did when he woke was to lie for a while watching the sky; the blueness of it slowly filling with great dark-edged clouds.

Then he sat up and pulled on the rucksack and walked down to the post office. He put the change from the fifty-pound note Shadow had given him in an envelope and posted it back to her. On the inside of the flap he scrawled, I can’t take any more.

Glastonbury was a crazy place. All the shops had books about the Grail; he flicked through them and found they were full of theories, history, photographs. Everything was brightly colored, hanging with crystals, swords, pentangles, healing herbs. The noise and the people seemed to hurt his senses; he felt bruised, wanted somewhere quiet, anywhere green. Sometimes he struggled to breathe. Like a fish out of water.

At the cross in the center of town, he stopped and looked back up the pavement. A man in a bright stripy T-shirt was gazing intently into a shop window, face turned away. Thoughtful, Cal walked on.

Owein. One of the Company. They must have been watching this place the whole time. He scowled, furious with himself. He should have known that!

Quickly, he ducked around the corner and began to run, up the steep, shop-lined street toward the Tor. From the Tor you could see for miles. From the Tor you might see anything. He didn’t look back till the last turning. There was no sign of anyone following. But Cal knew the Company; they were on to him now. They’d find him. They were his friends; they’d want to look after him. Get him home. But he could only find the castle on his own.

The footpath led over green hilly fields where yellow flies buzzed over dried cowpats and the hedges were white with cow parsley and campion. This was Chalice Hill, and beyond it, rising crazily, ridged in furrows and mysterious terraces, was the Tor. Crossing the last field toward it he saw the small moving specks that were people up there, and stopped, instantly still. You could see for miles. His own thought mocked him. So they’d have someone up there, wouldn’t they, watching for him. He swore.

He waited till dark, holed up under a hedge. Slowly the daylight died, night coming early in a rush of high wind; it rustled the trees above him and the noise of cars and people faded until the wind became the only sound in the world, louder than he had thought it could ever be. When he sat up and brushed the leaves and soil off, it roared around him, buffeting him into the hedge, small raindrops spattering his face.

He crossed the small lane and began to climb. There was a concrete path, and then steps. They wound around the ridges of the strange hill; high steps, and soon he was breathless, but the higher he went the stronger the wind was, flapping the collar of his jacket and whipping his hair into his eyes, making him stagger as the steps came around to the west. Below, the countryside spread out, dark and shadowy on the flat levels, the roads marked with red streetlights, the whiter sprawl of house windows glinting, and beyond that the low hills, the far, far distant darkness of the sea, and Wales.

Cal stopped, his side aching. Then, carefully, he left the steps and scrabbled up the last steep slope, gripping for handholds in the slippery grass, digging his toes in and hauling himself up. Wind roared in his ears. He lay with his face close to the sweet-smelling turf, and peered over the top.

There was a tower—the tower of the old church. It rose, huge and black against the night sky. Inside it, small red glimmers, the reflections of a fire, danced and leaped.

He listened. There were voices, low voices talking. The flattened roar of the flames in a gust of wind. Crackles.

Carefully he pulled himself up and crouched, keeping low, off the skyline. Then he crawled to the long dark shadow of the tower and slid into it, into the corner made by the great buttress.

A tiny scatter of music came out. An advertisement for a concert in Bristol.

Cal grinned. He peered around the buttress and through the open archway, his hands gripping the crumbling, cold stones.

Two men were wrapped in blankets by the fire. Both were asleep. Beside them a radio bleated into a pop song, so thin that he knew its batteries were almost gone. As far as he could tell in the shadows, the men were strangers to him. But that didn’t mean they weren’t in the Company.

He stepped back, and back, watching them, but as they didn’t move except to breathe he let the darkness cover him and turned, facing out, into the wind. It hurtled itself against him like some beast; he held his arms out to it, wide, letting the rain hit him so hard he felt it would bruise him. All across the miles of the wide Somerset levels it roared, and he was the first thing it met, high in its wild, raging storm path, and above him the osprey soared, wings wide, and below the land was dark, the lights going out one by one as he put them out deliberately in his mind, like the candles in Bron’s banquet room.

And he saw Corbenic.

How could he have missed it?

It was huge, its windows blazed with light! No more than a mile away, it rose up out of the dark lands like a mass of granite, its walls and turrets outlined with torches, a vast castle, the only castle, a haphazard conglomerate of every castle he had ever seen, in every picture, film, book. It was a stronghold, invulnerable. Birds cawed and swirled over its highest pinnacles, sentinels patrolled its battlements. In its hundred courtyards horses were stabled. Blindfold hawks slept in its mews, cooks worked in its kitchens, a thousand servants, squires and serving maids, knights and women, poets and singers thronged its halls. This was how a castle should be.

And then the wind stung his eyes and it blurred and faded.

“Wait!” he shouted in panic. “Wait for me!”

“Cal.” Her voice was close behind him. He turned and she was there, in the old sweater and trousers that never seemed clean.

He stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“You always said that.”

“Did you think I never meant it?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, baffled. “I don’t know, do I! If you meant it, why did you go on drinking? Why didn’t you change? Why did you let the time go on, days, years, all that time. All the time that belonged to me! That should have been mine!” He was yelling, he knew. The wind took the words away as soon as he’d shouted them; it flung them out into the dark land.

His mother sat down on the grass, catching her hair to keep it from blowing across her eyes. “Because of the castle,” she said wonderingly, looking out at it. “That was the reason.” She smiled at him, and he saw she was calm, as she’d never been. “You see, Cal, I always thought they were voices but they weren’t. They were echoes. No one explained that to me. I was hearing them and they were real, but not in the way I thought. And I hated hearing them, so I did anything to get away, to drown them. And I’m sorry, Cal, love, because it was always you that got hurt. The fear was so stifling I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t. The voices were all the world, but that should have been you, my little boy, my son. All the things you missed out on, never did, never had. I can never give you that back, Cal.”

It was as if she was speaking about someone else. As if all that was over. Long finished.

“I should have come home,” he said bitterly.

She stood and reached out, her hand almost touching him. “When you left, all I thought of was your father. How he left. He never came back either.”

Cal closed his eyes; only a stinging second of darkness. When he opened them she wasn’t there, had never been there. The sudden emptiness of it was a torment, and he turned and looked out at the great castle, and suddenly tore the straps of the rucksack open and rummaged in it furiously, pulling out the crumpled card he had brought from the flat, with its childish rounded writing and the picture of the flowers, carefully drawn in crayon.

“Don’t go without this!” he screamed. He opened his hand, and the wind took it. In a flap of sound it was there and it was gone.

The castle went with it.

And when the urgent voice behind him said, “Stand still, Cal. You’re too near the edge,” he even smiled as he turned.

Kai stood in his dark coat beside the tower. Behind him, in a wide semicircle, were some of the Company—Gwrhyr, Owein, a dozen of the Sons of Caw. And Hawk.