Darkhenge

I know why the hill resounds.

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

The ground was rising, but still marshy. Plumes of gas plopped from it and hung, shimmering with a pale green phosphorescence, stinking of rot. As Rob strode after Vetch, he knew that he was worn with exhaustion and worry, that they had scrambled for hours through stands of oak and rowan, only to reach this place where every growth seemed stunted and dwarfish, twisted in brackish mire.

Since they’d left the caer there had been no sign of Clare. Twice Vetch had turned and called out to her, “Goddess! Please!” But nothing had moved down the long aisles of the wood. Now, deep in mist, Vetch paused for breath. He gasped. “The stars.”

The sky seemed closer. The summer constellations hung unmoving, the Milky Way a glimmer. For a moment Rob had no idea what was different; then his heart gave a leap of fear.

Night. From far in the west, darkness was spreading, a real midnight blackness; in his mind, Rob mixed it on the palette. “I thought you said—”

“The Unworld changes. Someone is controlling this.” Vetch mused, arms folded. “Rob,” he said reluctantly, “why would she want to stay?”

Rob tugged one boot out of the mire. “She’s always been a bit … stubborn.” He thought of her suddenly, of the time they’d been messing around with the radio, each trying to snatch it, and it had got broken. Her blurted, hot rage. I always get the blame for everything.

And he had kept quiet, and let it happen.

Vetch was watching. Not wanting to talk, Rob marched on.

Birds were moving. For the first time since entering the Unworld, Rob became aware of its hidden life. A heron flew above the trees, its slow wing flap terrifying. A tiny lizard, black as velvet, streaked across the path.

They walked through a stand of beech, all brown and crisp leaved, into a place where there was grass, soft mossy grass, with tiny closed blue flowers, and bracken.

Trickling through it, shallow and almost silent, clogged with algae and winding water reed, was a small river.

Vetch stopped, waist high in the umbels of cow parsley.

Rob came past him, astonished.

He knew this place.

It was near Silbury Hill, on the banks of the Kennet. When he was small, they’d had picnics here, his mother and him, and Chloe, only a little girl. Jam sandwiches and chips and little cakes from the baker’s. Sticky orange juice, striped straws that tangled.

He stood and stared. Three bright yellow plastic plates lay on the grass. On one a silver paper wrapping was crinkled up into a ball. He knelt and picked it up. Next to it a dented Frisbee lay, near the nettle patch Chloe had stung her hand in.

“You recognize this?” Vetch said.

“Of course! It’s near Swallowhead Spring.” He shook his head. “But there wasn’t a forest anywhere near; just a cornfield on the other bank there, and some trees, a hedge—”

“Was Chloe with you?”

“Yes.” He was staring at the nettles. They were enormous. Vast spines sprouted from their stems, each with a gleaming pinprick of venom.

Vetch said, “Rob, think. How long ago?”

“About six years. She was … six, seven? She stung her hand....”

The poet crossed to the nettles and crouched by them, careful not to touch. “So I see,” he said, and at the same time a sound rang out, making them both jerk their heads up. A horn, blowing. Echoing and strange, it boomed over the river.

Vetch turned abruptly. “We’re moving through Chloe’s mind. Deeper and deeper, as we follow her through the circles of the caers. She remembers this place; that’s why it’s here. Her clearest memory is of the nettles, which is why they’re so enormous. It’s a child’s terror.”

“But it’s a real place.” Rob nodded toward the willows on the bank. “Just through there, and over the stream, is Silbury.”

Without a word, Vetch stood and pushed through the silvery branches.

Rob followed. He almost had to crawl in places, the network of pliant twigs scraping his back. Once, Vetch snagged the crane-skin bag, and tugged it free. Then he wriggled through a screen of leaves.

When Rob emerged after him, the poet was standing a little way ahead.

In front of them, over a lake of crystal clear water, rose a white, gleaming hill, smooth as a seashell. Around its sides crawled a chalk road, rising in terraces.

Vetch nodded, as if he understood. “Spiral Castle,” he said.

“You’re wrong.” Chloe stood up and marched around the crazily tilted room. “I only did it because if they’d hurt you, I would have felt it was my fault. That’s all. Blame Mac for lecturing me. He’s my godfather. Well, almost my godfather.”

In this caer there was no furniture. There were only seashells, vast and in heaps.

The King lay in an enormous oyster, eating cockles with a pin. As always his face was a mystery, but there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice.

“The truth is you’re beginning to like me. The prisoner always grows to like her captor.”

“I’m not!” She kicked the shells, wishing there were windows instead of the gleaming mother-of-pearl walls. “I hate you.”

“So you’ll escape again?”

“I might.”

He nodded, then swung his feet down and looked up at her. “If you hadn’t come back they would have given me to the forest, Chloe,” he said soberly.

“Who were they?” She came and crouched on the floor. “I couldn’t see much. The man with the candles had his back to me and the light was dazzling.”

“Intruders. They’ve broken in from above, found a hole that I thought was sealed centuries ago. There are three of them. I call them the Roebuck, the She-hound, and the Plover. Because these are some of the shapes they shift into. In the legends of Annwn they always come when the trees move. They’ll try and take you away and lead the trees against me.”

She snorted. “The trees seem to be doing a fair job by themselves.”

For a moment she sensed his old fear; then he shrugged and settled back into the shiny hollow. “Not here. Here the lake will keep them out.”

She stood, one hand on the pearl-smooth wall.

They had crossed the lake in a boat made of what seemed like an enormous yellow plastic cup, with an oar like a bent spoon; there were no bridges, he told her. Then he had drawn the boat up, and before she could stop him, he had taken a stone and smashed a great crack in the bottom, and it had filled with water and sunk with barely a gurgle.

Annoyed, she had stormed in front of him up the chalk path.

It had spiraled around the hill, a white track that soon left her breathless. Wind had gusted against her, stinging her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. On each side of the path a border of pearls gleamed, like the double rope Dad had given Mum last Christmas, and between them some small white things that had seemed so puzzlingly familiar she had had to kneel and pick one up. Light, desiccated pieces of crust.

Breadcrumbs?

Coming behind her, he had laughed.

But once at the top, the view had dismayed them both.

As far as she could see in every direction, the forest marched. To the north it rose up to crown a low hill and to the east a ridge, long and narrow. It was as if the Spiral Caer was at the bottom of a shallow bowl of woodland, deep in a cauldron of trees.

Chloe bit her lip. Where was there to escape in all this? But she was determined to keep him unsure of her, so she folded her arms and glared at him. “So where’s this castle then?”

Under his mask, he had been smug. “Inside.”

The top of the white hill was flat; in its very center a spiral stairway had descended, an exact counterpart to the outside; this also widened as it went down. At first the walls were blocks of smoothed chalk; her fingers had caught their irregularities, the flattened ants and crushed grasses trapped between them. Then the spiraling corridor had begun to gleam; it had been like walking deep inside a vast seashell, like the one on her bedroom window at home, and the whiteness had become iridescent and the steps a long ramp of pearl and creamy shimmer, slippery underfoot.

Finally they had come to this room, seemingly the sole chamber, in the heart of the shell. Circular and windowless, its roof and walls and floor merged into one, vague reflections moving in it. And it wasn’t silent either, like the other caers had been; this one hummed, a low, constant hushing, as if around some bend the waves of the sea murmured on a distant beach.

Listening now, she said, “There’s no one else in here, is there?”

His head turned sharply. “Of course not. Why?”

“I can hear a voice.”

He sat up, both hands on the oyster rim.

She was sure now. Someone was speaking, very far off, very faint. Someone was talking in an endless one-sided conversation, his voice modulating up and down; she could make out questions and intonation, the drone of words, the hiss of esses. Almost she felt that the words were made up of letters that had melted, that were trickling and running down the shimmering chute of the ramp, arriving here hopelessly mixed and heaped, fused into fantastic sounds.

“It’s nothing.” The King looked around nervously. “Forget it.”

Words picked themselves up, put themselves together. She recognized them: theater, production … terrible nuisance really, Chloe … your mum…

Eyes wide, she stared at him. Then she said, “It’s my father!”

Vetch crouched at the water’s edge and dipped a hand in. Drawing up some of the green weed, he examined it curiously.

“Well?”

“The forest will be able to cross this. Roots will snake out under it, then undergrowth will rise and drown and rise again on the matted remains. But it will take time.” He stood, looking at the white spiral ramp of the hill.

“It’s Silbury, isn’t it?” Rob hugged himself. “This is the downs, lost under all this woodland. These are real places Chloe knows.”

“The Unworld is always a real place. And when Darkhenge was made, the downs were forested.” Preoccupied, Vetch rummaged through the crane-skin bag; he tipped a pile of rubbish out of it—nuts, berries, a candle, the ogham sticks, the tinderbox, a scatter of ribbons and knotted threads. Quickly he scooped them up and thrust them into his pockets; then, to Rob’s surprise, tossed the bag on the water.

“What are you doing?”

The poet folded his arms. “We could swim. ‘I have been both flesh and fish.’ But why get wet?” He glanced back, into the trees. “Besides, the goddess may be a wolf behind us, or a pike under the surface.” He knelt, and put his face close to the rippled water. Softly he said, “I can feel you, Clare. I can hear your heartbeat.”

Rob wasn’t listening. He was watching the bag as it opened, unfolded, grew to a small skin boat, its thread a trailing rope.

Vetch grabbed it and hauled it in; dragging a straight branch from the woodland, he broke the twigs off to make a pole. Then he climbed in, and held out one hand to Rob.

Rob looked up at the caer, then grasped the poet’s cool hand and stepped into the boat. It rocked, and he sat very quickly.

Vetch pushed off. Watching the misty surface warily, he poled them across the crystalline lake.

The King leaped out of the shell. He said nothing. Instead they both listened.

The voice came from unknowable distances. Chloe felt it echoing and whispering through the Spiral Castle as if the whole building was an enormous ear, twisted and fine boned, and she was trapped in a tiny space at its center. Her father’s voice was huge. The words seemed too big, as if she had shrunk, or the world she had left was gigantic now, and she could never grow to be a normal size there ever again.

“Make it stop,” she muttered.

The King scowled under his mask. “I can’t! I told you, the three have opened a hole, a place called Darkhenge.”

“What’s that got to do with my father?” She turned on him. “He sounds upset. He sounds … scared.”

He tapped the smooth shell, anxious. “Well, maybe he is. He must miss you.”

She stepped forward. “Let me see him.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t!”

“I can’t, Chloe! I don’t know how.”

She put her hands over her ears. “Then make it stop! I don’t want to hear him if I can’t answer!”

Vetch laughed his soft laugh. Kneeling at the entrance, he upended the crane-skin bag and seeds poured out of it: hazelnuts, acorns, conkers, berries, sloes. They cascaded down as if the bag was still huge; there were far more than it could possibly contain.

Crouched above him, Rob peered down the seashell spiral. “Now what?”

“We go down.”

The poet snapped the thread shut, slung the bag over his head and shoulder, and pushed it under his dark coat. He descended three steps, the seeds rolling and crushing under his feet. Looking up, his eyes were dark. “Be ready. They’ll be expecting us.”

The King said nothing, and when Chloe looked at him he was standing by the tilted lintel of the doorway, and out in the corridor something was rattling. It was slithering and tinkling down the long spiral ramp, and as she took her hands down from her ears and ran over to him it seemed to grow in size, thundering until she felt a vast boulder would roar into the chamber, an avalanche of rock that would bury them both.

“What is it?” she screamed.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “They’re still following! They’ve crossed the water.”

With a final mighty rumble the object clattered into the room, rolled across the pearly floor and lay still, inches from Chloe’s feet.

She stared down at it. It wasn’t huge at all.

It was a tiny black seed.