Darkhenge

There is nothing in which I have not existed.

“THE BATTLE OF THE TREES”

Rob spread his hands against the stones and leaned his forehead on them. “She can’t have walked through it.”

“Yes she can.” The King sat wearily by the puddles on the chalky floor. “To her, this is something to be manipulated. She lives in a world now where everything can be as she wants. Have you any idea how intoxicating that must be?”

Rob didn’t want to think. Since the alarm had snapped off, the silence had been too terrifying. “What about us?”

“We’re trapped. Unless, of course, there’s something in the druid’s bag you can use.”

Rob hesitated. Then he pulled the bag from around his neck and opened it, turned it upside down, and shook it.

Nothing.

Baffled, he groped inside. “It’s empty! But it was full of stuff. It was heavy!”

The King seemed amused under his mask. “Perhaps the poet keeps his secrets better than we think.”

Rob glared. A drip of water fell from the slabbed roof onto his neck, making him jump. Then he said, “What did Clare mean, that it was once a woman’s skin?”

The King nodded. “Oh yes, that’s true. Her name was Aoife. A sorceress named Iuchra wanted her husband, so she asked Aoife to come swimming with her and then turned her into a crane. The bird flew to the house of the sea lord Manannan, where she lived for two hundred years. And when she died he made a bag from her skin, and in it he placed his treasures. This he gave to the poet.”

“Vetch?”

“All poets. Any poet.” The King picked it up curiously. “They say that when the tide is full, so is the bag, and when the tide is out the bag is empty.”

Rob slammed his hand against the stone. “Great!”

“But in fact it is not quite empty now.” The King held it up to him. “Listen.”

Taking the soft leather, Rob put his ear to it, half afraid something might come out. At first he heard only the creaking of the leather, and then an undertone of sound, a murmuring. “What is it?”

“Words,” the King said. “The bag is full of words.”

They were in all languages. Loud, angry arguments and quiet pleadings, complex explanations and simple prayers. Words that twisted and manipulated and berated and demanded. And through the babble and behind it, there was a music of syllables, as if all the poetry of the world and the Unworld was being recited together, a rosary of crafted sound, each vowel and consonant clear, itself, as individual as the trees in the wood. As if the bag contained a work that never ended, that would go on until something impossible was made, an existence was formed. He found himself thinking of Mac’s voice, reading the Christmas gospel among the candles at mass. In the beginning was the Word.

He lowered it slowly. “I’m an artist. I don’t know about words.”

“But the poet isn’t here, and we must do what we can.” The King stood. “I would suggest you put your hand in, take a handful of sound and meaning, and lift it out.”

Feeling lost, Rob put his hand in. There was nothing to lift but he lifted it out, and as it came he felt it slither in his fingers, harden, twist, clatter onto the chalky floor. Briefly the things were ogham sticks, but as they touched the soil they became a cascade of antlers, flint knives, the wide shoulder blades of cattle.

The King groaned and picked one up. “Antler picks. Used to build this tomb, millennia ago.”

Rob lifted another and tested it against his palm. The tines were sharp, the grip smooth, as if many hands had honed it. He looked up at the stones of the corbeled roof. “Then we’d better use them too,” he said.

It was brilliant to be riding again. She could only gallop if she made the trees stand aside, and that wasn’t easy. The trees resisted, they didn’t want to do it; they closed up tight again behind her. But for a few moments she let Callie run across the cropped turf of a hill slope, the moon high and full overhead. It was like the downs at night, and there were moths and bats and an owl that flew from tree to tree, and in some places where the ground was low were fireflies, their tiny glimmers lost among bracken and heather.

But keeping the trees away was a strain, and when she forgot, they closed in again, and it was too tiring to stop them. They seemed to be guiding her, forming a long avenue with smooth grass down the center, so that she rode the way they wanted her to ride, always downhill, the wind dying away and a midnight stillness falling on the land.

The sixth caer must lie ahead. She knew that each circle led farther in, and yet each was larger, the forest within it denser. And the wood was not so empty now; creatures were stirring in it. She had heard wolves, and a boar had grunted in a thicket as she passed, its bowed back spined. But that didn’t worry her. Why should it? She was Queen of the Unworld.

Rob was far behind. She didn’t want to think about him. Clare must have dealt with Vetch. Neither of them would be seriously hurt, surely. And yet she tugged on the reins and drew Callie to a walk, glancing back down the eerie avenue of trees.

Then the enormity of what she had ordered the King to do swept over her like a cold dread. She imagined Rob’s terror as the knife slashed the vines, his scream as he fell.

She stopped the horse.

What was happening to her? She put both hands up to her face, felt her cheekbones and eyes, the reins slipping so that Callie cropped the dark grass.

Rob.

She’d always looked up to him. He was older, had always been there, in school, holding her hand on her first day. She remembered how cross she’d been when she realized she’d always be younger, that she’d never catch up with him. How Mum always cut him a bigger slice of cake, because he was a boy.

Stupid things to be jealous of.

But you couldn’t kill someone in a world that didn’t exist.

Could you?

She looked back.

Maybe she should go home. Vetch would know how. And Mac was back there. If she found the Chair in the seventh caer, she would never see Mac again, or Mum or Dad, or the girls at school. Or even Tom Whelan. For a moment anguish filled her up; then the trees rustled in the Unworld breeze, and all their faces faded.

They seemed distant, unreal. Perhaps she had only ever been asleep and dreamed them. Perhaps there was no world out there.

The harness chinked. Callie blew through her nostrils, dipped her head.

Chloe patted her neck and leaned down, rubbing the familiar white coat. “Don’t worry. It won’t be far now.”

If she was Queen, surely she could make the sixth caer come to her.

But when she lifted her head, she saw it at the end of the avenue.

Spun from tree to tree, like a web.

“It’s coming! Look out!”

The stone tipped. A shower of soil fell onto Rob’s upturned face; he coughed, shook it away, his arms straining up. Heavy on his shoulders, the King’s weight made him stagger; the man’s fingers dug into the widening crack, forcing the pick in, working it up and down.

Fine gravel crumbled; then with a crack the stone gave. The King hauled it out and tossed it down; he shoved the antler into the gap and pushed, ramming it upward until it went through so suddenly he lurched, and Rob had to stagger sideways to hold him steady.

“We’re out!”

Cold wind gusted in.

The hole was tiny; the King’s shape filled it. He worked fiercely, tearing down stones and rubble, and Rob gripped his legs and grimaced at the pain in his chest and thought about Clare, how furious she would be at the damage. This was an ancient monument, after all.

But then this was the Unworld, and nothing was the same.

“I can get through now. Push me up.”

As the King scrambled and swore and shoved his boots into his face, Rob’s worry about Vetch resurfaced. The poet was no longer ill or frail; the Unworld had strengthened him, but it had transformed Clare too, and she was ruthless. What was happening to them?

The King’s weight jerked and mercifully lightened; with a sudden slither he was through the hole. After a moment he leaned back through, reaching down. “Right. Pass the bag up first.”

“No chance.” Rob slipped the strap around his neck. He piled the fallen stones together and climbed, wobbling, onto the heap, squeezing head and shoulders into the gap. The King’s voice was rueful. “Suit yourself.”

It took an age to get out, being pulled and scrabbling and hauling himself up by his arms, and when he had finally climbed onto the roof of the ruined barrow, he was exhausted, and wanted only to lie on the dark leaf drift and rest.

But the King was urgent. “She’s getting away from us. We have to run!”

They ran till they were breathless. The wood had a new, silver glimmer; after a while Rob saw the moon through the dark mesh of treetops. It made things easier, but it had brought out animals, or Chloe had.

The King grew more and more nervous; as they burst through into a place where the trees lined a long track, he drew closer to Rob, grabbed his sleeve, stopped him.

“Be careful. She’ll have left traps.”

He was right. They found two chasms opening in the ground, as if Chloe had slashed the avenue as she had the paintings, and then a dangerous gushing stream they had to wade across, fast and deep, its bed of chalk and streaming weed.

Once over, they found a strange bogland of tussocks and hollows; it was hard to struggle through, and looking up, Rob knew that the trees had closed in around it. The King dragged a mired foot from the soft ground and toppled. Rob had to steady him; for a moment they were chest to chest.

“Why don’t you take that stupid mask off?” Rob breathed.

He’d thought the King would pull away. Instead his voice came soft and sly. “You do it, Rob. I won’t stop you.”

Startled, Rob put his hand up to the face of blackthorn. Then he stopped. And drew back.

The King’s mouth widened into a smile. “Exactly. Because you don’t want to know who I am. Who it is that Chloe loves.”

“She loves me.”

The King shrugged. “Does she?” His face came close to Rob’s ear. “She ordered me to cut the beanstalk. With you on it.”

“Liar!”

“I’m afraid not. She’s not the Chloe you know, Rob, or the one you’ve invented. This Chloe has never existed before.”

A growl, close behind. They both turned.

An animal was squatting under a low bough of oak. Its eyes were small and red, and in the moonlight its muzzle pointed straight at them, intent.

Rob froze. What is it? he wanted to whisper, but the King’s sudden rigid fear turned him cold; he kept totally still.

The beast yawned.

It stood up and ambled out into the moonlight and became a wolf, huge and silver. The long nose sniffed, the narrow, shrewd eyes moved from Rob to the King, as if it smelled their terror, sensed exactly their inability to run, deliberated between them.

“Listen to me.” Rob kept his voice low; even so the wolf’s ears pricked. “Edge closer. We can climb the tree behind me. Move slowly. Don’t turn your back on it.”

He tugged his foot from the bog. Took one squelchy step.

The King was frozen in fear.

“Come on.”

“I can’t. Not the trees.”

“The trees won’t—”

“The trees are my enemies. I came from them. They want me back!”

“For God’s sake…”

The wolf crouched. Rob didn’t wait. He leaped back, felt the tree’s hard bark, turned and swung himself up into it, and as soon as his foot thrust into ivy, the night erupted behind him with a great splash. And a terrible scream.

She heard it.

She had dismounted and was leading Callie down the chalk track to the Woven Castle, but the scream made her pause and look back. It was faint and far but she knew who it was. She had got to know his voice, and his fear.

“No,” she said petulantly.

A bell rang. It chimed from the structure ahead of her, startling her. Its rich note hung in the frosty stillness, making the cold deeper, freezing her breath, shivering the moonlight into a thing of white beauty.

Was the caer inhabited? None of the others had been. Was it defended?

She looked back up the dark avenue of trees and said, “I just want them slowed down. I don’t want them hurt. Do you understand that?”

The Unworld forest creaked and rustled.

As if it leaned toward her.

As if it listened.

The King’s knife slashed wildly; the wolf stood its ground. Its head was low, its snarl ferocious; saliva dripped from its fangs, skin drawn back from the red gums. And in the shadows of the wood Rob was sure there were more, a slinking pack, running in swiftly.

“Come on!” he yelled, cold with fear.

The King turned and ran. He made three steps before the wolf was on him, and another before its weight flattened him on the soft ground. Rolling, he fought it off, but the jaws were snarling, grabbing an arm and shaking, jerking back from the knife.

“Rob!” he screamed. “Rob!”

Rob tore the crane-skin bag off and hurled it down, then threw himself after it. He landed hard, falling forward on his hands, pain in his side.

Kicking out, he screamed and yelled at the beast; it leaped back, growling, and he grabbed the King, straddling him, heaving him up. “Move!”

Dragging the torn arm over his shoulder, he ran with the stumbling man, but there was no way, he knew, of getting him into the tree.

Gray bark reared; he turned, his back slammed against it.

Together, they faced the wolf.

Well, it wasn’t like the other caers.

There were no walls, or at least not solid ones. It was a castle made of rope, or what seemed like rope; vast thick skeins of looped stuff, twisted and slightly fuzzy to touch, hanging from trees and posts and timber pillars, making a honeycomb of openings and tunnels.

The colors too were varied. In most places it seemed red but there were flecks of blue and yellow and green. It was like wool magnified a hundred times, a knitted castle, matted fibers under a microscope.

There were so many openings she had no idea which to choose; this caer was a labyrinth. As she hesitated, the bell chimed again, deep inside, this time more urgent.

Chloe bit her lip. This wasn’t right. Whichever way she chose would be the right way, because this was her world. She was the writer of the story. Choosing an entrance, she led Callie into it, but after only a few steps four or five dark red openings led off in different directions, and she could see through the openwork walls. It was utterly confusing.

“Now what!” she snapped.

The answer came from behind her, though there had been no one there.

“This is how it is for poets. Always choosing and selecting.”

She turned, icy with fury.

He was leaning in a loop of the stuff, as if it was a swing, like the one in her garden at home.... His face was dark but she recognized the star mark on his forehead.

The three scars on his hands.