“What?”
“I’d come home late, and she’d cut herself. With the kitchen knife. Long, red slashes, on her arms. Blood everywhere, on her sleeves, the sofa, everywhere.”
Shadow was rigid. “What did you do?”
“Freaked out. Panicked. Mopped up. Got her to Casualty—God, we lived in that place. Locked up the knives. Lived with it, the terror of it happening again, rocked myself to sleep. Never told anyone.” He looked up, stricken. “There’s all that in me, Shadow, and I can’t get it out. And I swore to her I’d be back for Christmas, I swore I would and I didn’t go, and I knew, I knew what she might do! Don’t you see, I can’t live with that! I can’t!”
He was shaking. His voice was broken up. “I’ve coped, always coped. Made rules. Never admitted . . . But now I’m lost, Shadow. I’m in pieces. There’s nothing left.” He was sobbing at last.
Shadow put her arms around him and held him tight and they sat together in the sunlight for a long time till he was calm, kids on skateboards going up and down the path in front of them, wheeling, their voices high in the bright air. Finally, confused, he rubbed his face and pulled away and said, “You didn’t answer my question about Glastonbury.”
“I can’t come, Cal. I have to stay here now, and that’s your fault. I promised I’d finish my exams and I will. I don’t think you should go either, not on your own.”
“I’m not . . .”
She turned to him. “Look. Stay a few days. Think about it. You’ll feel better.” She sounded choked. Then she lay back in the striped deckchair and closed her eyes against the ripple from the river. “There are two sorts of life, aren’t there? The one that seems ordinary, like this, and then the reflection from it. Curved, shiny. All mixed up.”
He should have known. Leaning over the mahogany banister that night he heard her voice, low and urgent. “He’s not right. He’s been sleeping rough for three months and can’t remember any of it. And now this nonsense about Glastonbury. Yes, but he needs to be home!”
Maybe Hawk said something; she laughed, low, but she wasn’t amused. Then she said, “Tomorrow. First thing. I don’t know what to do, Hawk. Just get here.”
Back upstairs, he waited, watching his own gaunt face in the mirror. When she had gone to bed he sat there still, hearing the clock chime in the hall below, the slow cars in the street, the laughter of late-night drinkers. When he finally moved he was stiff; but he picked up the rucksack and went downstairs silently, and let himself out and walked down the long broad street without looking back.
Next morning, on the bus crossing the high plateau of Mendip, he thought of Merlin, because this was not how quests were achieved, not how the soul was saved, not squashed beside a fat woman with shopping bags and behind a kid defiantly smoking under a NO SMOKING sign. But he knew that unless he found Corbenic he would be lost, he could not move on. He would spend his life in regrets. He had caused his mother’s death, he had lied to the Company and betrayed Shadow back into the life she detested, and there was nothing he could do about any of that. But Bron was left. He might still be able to tell Bron he’d been wrong. And if Bron was real then he was not going mad.
In Corbenic, there might be another chance.
She would be waking about now. On the end of her bed she would find the CD, and would be staring at it. Listen to this, he had scrawled on the cover.
Outside, now Bristol was left behind, the countryside was wide and green, the buds on the trees bursting with fresh leaf, the sky blue and windy with high cloud. They travelled through villages he had never heard of, with names out of lost stories: Farrington Gurney, Temple Cloud, Chewton Mendip, and people got off and on and the crush eased and the smoker was gone and he could breathe.
And then the bus came down through a steep wood of birch and turned a corner, and before him he saw a wide plain, flat as a chessboard with its tiny fields, and rising out of it like a conical, mystical hill from a medieval painting, was the Tor, crowned with its ruined church.
At the town’s entrance the sign said THE ANCIENT AVALON. He hoped it still was. Though as he got off and a sudden shower turned the world gray, it seemed farther away from Corbenic than any other place that he’d been.
Cup
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.