Darkhenge

Who can measure Annwn?

Or know the extent of its darkness?

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

The forest of the Unworld shivered. A ripple and murmur moved through it, disturbing birds. Starlings and thrushes and jackdaws rose, karking and fluttering.

Clare sat at the foot of the poplar, gazing up at them.

Darkness had come. Maybe for the first time in millennia the stars glinted through the dark midnight of the trees, and a breeze gusted, so that loosened leaves fluttered down. Stumps and undergrowth had become shadows, gatherings of mystery. Small rustling movements seemed huge. Moths hatched and danced in the starlight.

She wrapped her arms around her knees, chilled.

Vetch certainly knew she was still hunting him. He always knew. She had spent lifetimes trying to catch up with him, to take back the knowledge he had stolen. As otter and greyhound and hawk and goddess she had pursued him; they had been flames on the marsh, stars that moved silently and infinitely slowly over the skies, grains of corn on a barn floor. In the world above they had played out their fate; she had been a woman called Clare, another echo of herself, another transformation. Remembering, she changed her appearance now, her clothes to faded dungarees, her hair plaited.

In all that time she had never wavered in her fury for revenge.

Until now.

She frowned, rubbing the lichen swirls on her face.

When she had pushed him down the stairs there had been one second of exhilaration, and then terror. As he fell, so violently, gasping and crashing down, utter terror.

For a moment she had been sure she had killed him.

It should have been a triumph. Instead it had been a cold spear in her heart. Her life was a pursuit of him. What would she do if he was gone? As the girl had run up past her she had stood rigid, then raced down and grabbed him, turned him, feeling for his heartbeat, at his chest to hear his breathing.

Relief had swamped her; relief and then fury, because he had made her feel that. Vetch. Gwion. Taliesin. He was her enemy, and she hated him because she could not hate him enough.

It was then she’d had an idea.

The crane-skin bag had lain under him, and she would have had it then if the boy hadn’t come. Now she smiled, and nodded. This time she’d steal it from him. There were other ways of revenge.

Leaves swirled. She looked up, then stood quickly.

Someone was climbing out of the Spiral Castle.

Two dark shapes against the stars, then running down the shell white hill. Clare narrowed her eyes. Chloe and the King. For a moment she wondered how they had escaped, how they would cross the lake; then she saw the smaller one beckon, and with a shiver of tree roots and soil, a causeway squelched up out of the green water, a bridge of dry land. Even from here she could hear how the girl laughed at that, a giggle of delight.

Clare frowned. It seemed the child was beginning to discover how the Unworld worked.

By the time she had walked down to the shore, they were already across, the King like a somber shadow in a new mask of dark holly.

Chloe was grinning; in the gloom she almost walked straight into Clare. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“What have you done?” Clare looked curiously up at the caer; already its whiteness was greening over. Trees were thrusting through its sides. “Where are they?”

“Inside.”

“But your brother—”

“Don’t talk to me about my brother!” Chloe snapped. “That’s my business. He and your druid want me to go back with them but I won’t.”

“Won’t?”

“I’ve told them.” She looked flushed, triumphant. Then demanded, “Haven’t I?”

The King nodded. He stood under the trees nervously, biting his nails. He glanced at Clare and then down. “It was her own idea,” he muttered.

Clare nodded, uneasy. “I see. So you’re going farther in?”

The girl shrugged. “Why not?” She jerked her head at the King. “He says there are seven caers, each stronger, and if I can reach the seventh, not even Vetch can force me to go back. No one can.”

“That’s the heart of the Unworld,” the King said earnestly. “The Chair itself.”

Clare nodded. “You don’t need to tell me. But Vetch will try everything to stop you.”

“Not if you deal with him.” The girl came up to her eagerly. “I thought that was what you wanted to do.”

“I thought so too.”

The girl’s eyes were bright; starlight glittered in their darkness. “So what went wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Chloe looked at her scornfully. “Adults,” she said, “are pathetic.” She marched away through the marshy hollow of silver birch. The King scrambled behind and Clare followed, noticing how the earth rose up to meet the girl’s feet, keeping her dry.

“You say Vetch stole everything from you.” Chloe turned abruptly. “Well, that makes him just like Rob. He’s stolen from me, though he’s too wrapped up in himself even to notice. He stole time, and people’s attention from me, and respect, and maybe even love. Just by being bloody Rob. So now I’m stealing all the same things from him. You could do that with Vetch. Couldn’t you?”

Clare tucked the ends of hair behind her ears. There was dirt under her nails; the peat of Darkhenge. She cleaned it out thoughtfully.

“I could.”

“And that would stop him catching me.” Chloe came up to her. Her eyes were bright; leaves drifted into her hair. She smiled a sly smile. “Will you do that, Goddess? That’s what he calls you, isn’t it? Can I trust you to do better this time?”

Clare didn’t answer. Finally she said quietly, “I used to think I was Queen of the Unworld. Now I’m not so sure.” She stepped back, chilled at the girl’s cool composure.

Chloe narrowed her eyes. Then, deliberately, she touched a twig. A leaf uncurled from it, opened, spread, crinkled, and died, all in seconds. “Decide,” she whispered.

Clare stared at the withered fragment. When she spoke again her voice was icy.

“Find the next caer. Leave Vetch to me.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Chloe half turned. “Because if it came to a struggle, I might have to do something bad like that to him. And I wouldn’t want to.”

She strode away, ducking under branches. The King hurried after her. As he slipped between the trees, he gave one glance back at Clare.

Even with the mask on, the look seemed strangely helpless.

They sat in silence. The shell room was a ruin, the shadows of the trees immense over them.

“I just don’t understand it,” Rob whispered.

He had said it before. He couldn’t stop saying it. His dismay was as difficult to grasp as a slippery snake.

Vetch took a candle stub from the bag and lit it. He dripped wax on a thick root and jammed the candle in. As the yellow light steadied and grew, he said gravely, “You must have known.”

“I swear I had no idea!”

“Come on, Rob. Not even from the diary?”

Rob held his breath. Then he put his hand in his pocket and tugged it out. The pages were bent now, the purple felt pen smeared from the forest damp.

He stared at the clotted pages. “I haven’t … didn’t want to read anymore.”

“Then you should.”

He didn’t move, so Vetch reached out gently and took the book from him; opening the cover, he separated the damp pages, peeling them apart.

Rob felt he should take it back, that he was betraying Chloe, but then amazement came again in a flood, because who was Chloe? This spiteful creature? The girl in the bed? The toddler on the swing? He was beginning to think he had never known her at all.

Vetch gave him a sideways look. “I think you should hear some of this.”

“No,” he said, sullen. But Vetch’s calm voice was already reading.

“‘August thirtieth: Rob’s exam results. All As, except Art which was A star. Mum and he are dancing around the kitchen. I want to be SICK—’”

“She’s just a jealous kid.... Just a kid…”

“‘April tenth: She’s taking him into Swindon tomorrow to buy him a new laptop. They asked me to go but I’m sure they were relieved when I said I was going out on Callie. They didn’t really want me around. I had the story all typed up but I didn’t want to show it to her while Rob was there. It’s worse when he doesn’t make fun, when he’s earnest and says things like, “Oh that’s lovely, Chloe,” and then winks at her over my head and when I turn around she’s smiling. I hate that. Can’t they see? Do they even know I exist?’”

Vetch’s dark eyes looked at him over the book.

Rob turned away. His mind was blank; he had no thoughts. There was only a cold dread that had started to creep in, like the tendrils of fog that were rising in the chamber of trees, the damp clouds of his own breath.

Finally he whispered, “What story?”

“It seems she was writing a lot of them.” Vetch turned the pages. “Poems too, I’m glad to see, and very good for her age. Imaginative. Spirited. She seems to have been collecting them together.” He paused, reluctant. “Then there’s this—no date:

‘I will never, never forgive him.

‘It was lying on the kitchen table, all ready. Mac had said he wanted to read some—I’d told him part of the plot, and I’d put it there ready. When I heard them all come in I ran down. He’d propped a painting on top of it. They were all standing around admiring it.

‘I stood at the back and didn’t say anything, and then when they’d gone I pulled out my notebook and there was paint on it. Dark green paint. On the cover and soaked into the first three pages, so that you couldn’t read them.’”

Helpless, Rob rubbed his hands through his hair.

“‘All the words were lost.’” Vetch’s voice sounded quietly appalled. Through his misery, Rob shivered. “‘All the sounds and meanings, all the words, so carefully chosen. Words that could never fit together again just like that, ever, ever again. And when he came in and saw me crying he said, “Oh, sorry, Chloe. Did your notebook get messed up? I’ll get you another one, don’t worry.” Another notebook. Another girly, pink, fluffy notebook with giggly girly guff inside. That’s what he meant. That’s what he thought—’”

“All right. All right!—” Rob jumped up and slammed his palm against the bole of an oak. “But I didn’t know! How could I know? She never said. She never told me she was writing anything important, anything that meant something!”

Vetch closed the book. “Paintings are easy to see,” he said after a moment. “Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.”

In the silence that followed they heard how a soft wind had risen; it gusted and creaked the branches. Rob came and sat down, and put his head in his hands. Vast shadows of himself huddled over the tree trunks.

Finally he said, “You mean this is why she doesn’t want to come back.”

“Surely.”

“All the time. All these years!”

Vetch put the notebook carefully in the crane-skin bag. Then he warmed his hands at the candle. “Listen to me, Rob. You’re at fault, yes, for not noticing, but so is she, for not saying. Your gift is the artist’s gift, of looking, and it failed you. Hers is in words and she didn’t speak them. Your parents may not have wanted to see. But Mac must have known.”

Rob tried to think. “Maybe. He always talked a lot to her, asked her about things. School. Friends. Gave her presents. She sort of pretended he was her godfather.”

Vetch nodded, his narrow face in shadow. “A wise man, the priest. He would see, but he’s no poet.”

The room was dark, the candle flame barely glimmering.

“Don’t think this is Chloe.” The poet looked up at him. “This is her jealousy, her anger. Words refine. Sometimes they simplify. Chloe is asleep in that bed, but here she exists as she might be, without love, without memory. We have to get her back. Even more so now.”

Rob wiped his face. “How? She doesn’t want to.”

“It’s worse than that.” Vetch looked rueful. “You’ve seen. She’s discovered that the Unworld is hers to control. She’ll use it against us. And the King has told her that if she reaches the seventh caer and sits in the Chair at its heart, she will be Queen here. Even I won’t be able to take her back.”

Rob nodded bleakly. “Then we have to do whatever it takes.”

“Good.” Vetch stood, and blew the candle out. As soon as he did, they saw night had come. Through the shattered roof of the pearl caer the stars glinted in familiar patterns; the wide constellations of summer, seen through a frost of branches.

Rob shivered. “It’s getting colder.”

Vetch was listening. “She’s brought down a gale.”

Outside, the forest threshed. Leaves slapped against Rob’s face. “Which way?” he gasped, and then had to shout it again so that Vetch could hear.

The poet pulled him into the shelter of a birch tree. “The fifth caer is a fearsome place. The Black Castle, the Fortress of Gloom. She will have to pass through it, and that won’t be easy, even for her. Quickly now.”

But the forest had changed; in the darkness it had become an impenetrable confusion of trees and branches. Without Vetch Rob would have been hopelessly lost. But the poet moved purposefully through the tangle of holly and ash and birch, ducking under branches, forcing his way through thickets. In this part of the wildwood the trees crowded densely. Even the rising gale could only roar in the treetops; down below, the air was musty and thick with spores, stinking of rot. Underfoot the leaf drift was so matted Rob sank in ankle deep; fungal growths cracked and splatted under his weight, and when he grasped the trees to steady himself, their bark was so wet it crumbled to sawdust in his fingers. He sneezed, shivered, wiping damp smears of lichen onto his clothes.

Far off, something howled.

Rob stopped. “What was that?”

They listened, breathless in the crackling, roaring wood. Just as Rob was coming to think he’d imagined it, it rang out again, a high, evil howl, as if a wolf had thrown back its head and was baying to the moon.

Vetch turned and pushed on grimly. “Until now,” he muttered, “the forest has been deserted. I fear its inhabitants are beginning to stir.”

Down a long hillside they ran, where roots sprawled out of the thin soil in networks of silver, half sliding, half skidding, the soil coming away under their feet and rattling into the darkness below. At the bottom was a small stream; Rob caught the gleam of starlight on its blackness. Cold water splashed as Vetch jumped over, then he soaked his own boot with a shock of iciness. It made him shiver like the shock he carried inside him, that he felt he was running away from, the shock of what Chloe had said, her fury at him. Well, I don’t love him. Trying to outrun it, he slammed into Vetch, who gasped, “Keep still!”

The poet’s thin hand grasped his sleeve and drew him down behind an alder clump. “Listen,” he breathed.

Not the howling. But just ahead, through the gusting night, a rhythmic crunch.

Once.

Then again.

Familiar.

Vetch listened to it for a moment. He slid forward. Rob rustled after him.

The night was black. So black and solid it seemed like a wall.

And then he realized it was a wall. A wall of inky stones so smooth the places where they fitted together were impossible to see, and as he lifted his eyes and craned his neck back he realized that it went up so high into the sky that the stars seemed to balance on its top, a vacuum, a wall of nothingness, oily with faint specks of reflected light.

This caer had no door.

And the trees held back from it. Between the edge of the forest and the wall was a rough, splintered stretch of ground, littered with boulders and rubble.

At the foot of the wall, someone was digging.

The chink of the spade was loud; it rang and echoed.

Vetch took a small tense breath, perhaps of relief. Then he stood, and walked out of the trees.

“So here you are,” he said.

The digger stopped, and turned. As she lifted her head, she wiped sweat from her smeared face; Rob saw it gleam. Clare leaned on the spade; she looked as worn and hassled as she had at Darkhenge; her plait was undoing and her dungarees were clotted with mud. But she smiled. “Been waiting for you, Vetch.”

He stopped.

Mistrust came over him; Rob saw how his eyes moved warily over the rubbled soil. But all he said was, “You pushed me down. In the darkness.”

She shrugged. “Do you blame me?”

“You could have killed me.”

She turned back to the wall, so they couldn’t see her face. “Well, I didn’t. There’s no way in here. We have to dig under.”

Vetch shook his head. “It would take too long.” He looked at her, considering, then up. “Climbing would be better. There will be a door; we can find it.”

“No rope.”

“I have rope, Goddess.” He pulled the strap of the crane-skin bag over his head.

Clare threw down the spade in disgust. “That bag of sorceries gets you through everything. What would you do without it, Vetch?” Her eyes were cold. “I suppose he’s told you what it’s made of, Rob? The skin of a woman turned into a bird?”

Vetch smiled his sad smile. “Not by me, Goddess.” He took one step.

And the trap opened. It opened like a mouth under him, an archaeologist’s trench, a goddess’s chasm; he gave a great cry and turned, flung himself at the edge, but it was too late; his fingers grasped only leaves, vines, pieces of rock that slithered in and fell under him, crashing to impossible depths.

“Rob!”

Rob was down. Something soft was thrust into his hands, he grabbed again but there was nothing, nothing but the slide and slither of soil, the bounce of rocks, the thud of a body far below.

And the roar of the gale.

On the other side of the wide crack Clare stared at him in fury. “Give that to me.”

He leaped up. His heart was thudding in his chest, the bag clutched tight against him. “You finally killed him.”

“I very much doubt that. The bag. It’s useless to you.”

“No.” He put his hand inside, found a scatter of small, soft pieces, whipped them out. In the dark he couldn’t see what they were—cloth, or maybe petals, or paper. Light, barely there.

Clare said furiously, “Rob, don’t you dare—”

He didn’t wait. He opened his hand and the petals streamed out in the gale, a brilliant arc. They wafted up and shimmered and transformed; they became silver coins, and grains of wheat, and feathers and letters and crystals and finally beans, small green beans like the ones in the fairy tale.

Clare screamed in rage.

But the beans hit the ground and grew; they smothered over her in seconds, the stalks streaking up the black wall, and Rob didn’t hesitate; he threw himself onto them, grabbing and tugging and finding a foothold, scrambling over her as she ducked, climbing, hauling himself up.

Toward the sky. Toward the stars.

Toward the two tiny faces that stared down at him.

Far up on the summit, high in the cold gale, Chloe turned to the King. “Have you got a weapon?”

He drew the knife reluctantly, the starlight on its blade. Frost crystals formed on it instantly.

She nodded. “Good. I’m going on, and I’m leaving you to stop him. If he manages to get up here, cut the beanstalk.”

As she turned, he pleaded, “Chloe…” The word made a cloud of icy breath.

It stopped her, but she didn’t look back. Only her hair gusted in the gale. Three lanky birds—cranes or herons—flapped down out of the sky and landed beside her; one squawked through its thin beak. She looked over at it.

“Surely you can do that for me.”

The King licked dry lips. “He’s your brother....”

She was silent. Then she said coldly, “You heard me. I said, cut him down.”