“Still in Bangor.” Still lying. “Look, I’ve got a few friends to see, and then . . . well, I thought I’d take a bit of a break, if you don’t mind.”
He could feel Trevor’s sigh. “Well, I suppose a few days would be only . . .”
“Not a few days. A week, maybe.”
“What! Doing what?”
“Traveling. I just feel . . .” He lowered his voice. “I just feel I need to sort myself out. Find out what I really want.”
“I can’t keep the job open indefinitely.”
“I know.” He didn’t say, “I don’t want the job.” He didn’t need to.
Trevor made a short, exasperated noise. “Look, Cal, it’s a hard time for you. You should be with people you know, family, not wandering the countryside with that New Age crowd. I presume it’s them you’re with?”
Cal said nothing.
“I don’t see . . . I thought you wanted a good wage, a good life.”
“I did,” Cal said bleakly. “But that’s what took me away from her.”
“You couldn’t have stayed there forever!” Trevor’s voice went soft, irritated. “You mustn’t think it was your fault.”
“I’ll ring again,” Cal said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” He put the phone down and looked at it a long time.
In the bedroom, he washed his face and turned the TV on, just to hear voices. Then he opened the rucksack and took out his crumpled clothes, his money, and the wrapped package at the bottom.
He laid the two pieces of the broken sword on the bed. They lay on the flowered cover, jagged edges facing each other. He picked them up, and tried to fit them together. They wouldn’t meet. With all his strength, he couldn’t force them. It was like pushing two like poles of a magnet together; he’d done it in science lessons. An invisible, unbreakable repulsion, and after a second of straining at it the pieces shot to one side, tetchily, refusing. He cut his hand on the sharp blade, and flung it down on the floor in despair.
Chapter Eighteen
Not one of the retinue knew him.
Peredur
He searched. For a week he tramped the countryside around Ludlow. He bought a pair of cheap hiking boots and photocopied the maps in the library. Every day he went out after breakfast and walked, down valleys with small cold streams rushing over rocks, up in the hills, through miles of frozen fields where curious cows collected around him and followed him in a cloud of breath from stile to stile. After only a day he knew he would never find Corbenic like this, but he couldn’t stop; the relief of having something to find, the insistence of the quest calmed him, and the walking, the mindlessness of it, soothed his soul. Out in the fields he could forget about Sutton Street, the funeral, the guilt, he could walk and walk and his mind would be empty, numbed; only when he trudged back into town at dusk, weary, wet, footsore, did the memories close around him like the old timbered buildings, full of shadows.
His money was running short. He moved to a cheaper bed-and-breakfast, kept by a grumpy couple who seemed to think he was some petty thief; everything was locked up and the room was drab and cold.
Oddly enough, it didn’t bother him. The luxuries of Otter’s Brook seemed like part of another life that had gone; lying in the damp bed he thought of them and smiled, as he would have at a child with some silly toy. His clothes were getting scruffy. He forgot to wash them. He wasn’t eating much. But then he didn’t seem to have much appetite.
Once or twice, odd things happened. Coming down the slope of a hill one afternoon, lost in thought, he had looked up and seen, surely, the roof of a castle over the wood below. For a moment it had been there, real and clear, and his heart had surged with some odd bitter joy, but even as he’d stopped and stared it had become clouds, a drifting bank of rain clouds that had tricked him, the battlements and towers breaking up, slowly elongating. The cloud had risen, and had rained on him, a cold, chilling sleet.
Another time, out on the bus from Leominster, he had come down a farm lane, over a stream, and to the edge of a forest, his feet crunching frozen puddles. The forest was dark, coniferous, smelling of sap. Inside it nothing had moved, no bird cheeps, no rustles. Utter stillness.
For a long moment he had stood there on the path, held by the silence. He knew there was something here, something being offered to him, but he was afraid to go in. He had turned back, worked his way around, angry at his own cowardice. Later, in the room, when he had checked the map, no forest had been marked on it at all.
He had not phoned Trevor again.
Sometimes he thought about Hawk and Shadow. Especially Shadow. What had happened to her? Had the police found her? Was she at home? Had she run off again? He had no idea and no way of finding out; he tried not to think of them at all, because that was easier. His mind was full of burned places that he winced away from.
Lying on the bed now, against the hard pillow, hearing the rain pour down the windows outside, he had no idea what to do next. Move on, maybe? South? Down the railway line?
The phone rang, making him jump. He turned his head and stared at it, astonished. It had never rung in the week he’d been here, and no one knew where he was. It had to be the landlord downstairs. Warily, he reached over and picked it up. “Yes.”
Silence. A distant, faintly crackling silence. Cal sat up. “Who is this?”
Someone spoke. A whisper. “Cal?”
He almost stopped breathing. His heart hurt. Words choked in his mouth.
“Cal. I love you, Cal.”
He flung the phone, as if it was hot. It crashed, hard, against the wall, the coiled flex dragging over the little bedside table; he stared at it in horror.
Outside, the rain pattered on the window. Someone came hurriedly up the stairs and knocked. “All right in there?”
Cal dragged his fingers through his hair. “Yes! Fine.”
“Good.” Without any asking, the door opened. The landlord gave a crafty look around, saw the phone. Then his eyes shifted; he was staring, fascinated, at the pieces of the sword. His narrow face darkened. “Staying another week, will you be? The wife wants to know.”
“No.” Cal was sweating, shaking. For God’s sake, couldn’t they see he was ill? He had to be ill. He had to be hearing things.
“Leaving then?” the man said, curious. “Sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.” His teeth were gritted. He wanted to scream.
The old man backed out. “Suit yourself.”
Cal barely knew whether he was there or not. When the door had softly shut he crossed to the window with one desperate stride and hauled up the sash, leaning out over the dim alley, breathing in the coldness, letting the rain soak his face and shirt, run down his skin, the shock of it numbing him, till after what seemed like hours the shivering started and wouldn’t stop.
Finally he crawled back to bed, pulled the covers over him and lay there, too cold to undress. But he couldn’t sleep until he’d got up again and pulled the phone connection out of the wall. Even then, for hours, he lay waiting for it to ring.
There was a castle in Ludlow. He’d already wandered around it, but this morning the old man put the greasy breakfast before him on its chipped plate and said, “Taking that sword of yours down to the reenactment, are you?”
Cal picked up the knife and fork in disbelief. He felt as if his whole life was a circle, bringing him back to things he thought were far behind.
“Reenactment?”
“Sort of siege. For the tourists.”
It was no use ignoring it. It couldn’t be a coincidence. And someone there might be able to mend the sword.
After breakfast he packed the blade and hilt in a plastic bag, feeling its peculiar shudder in his fingers, and walked down to the castle. Ludlow was different from Chepstow. The castle stood on a cliff, but coming from the town it was level, and the ruins were less stark. There was a round chapel, and the high, broken walls of a great hall.