Cal stopped, his side aching. Then, carefully, he left the steps and scrabbled up the last steep slope, gripping for handholds in the slippery grass, digging his toes in and hauling himself up. Wind roared in his ears. He lay with his face close to the sweet-smelling turf, and peered over the top.
There was a tower—the tower of the old church. It rose, huge and black against the night sky. Inside it, small red glimmers, the reflections of a fire, danced and leaped.
He listened. There were voices, low voices talking. The flattened roar of the flames in a gust of wind. Crackles.
Carefully he pulled himself up and crouched, keeping low, off the skyline. Then he crawled to the long dark shadow of the tower and slid into it, into the corner made by the great buttress.
A tiny scatter of music came out. An advertisement for a concert in Bristol.
Cal grinned. He peered around the buttress and through the open archway, his hands gripping the crumbling, cold stones.
Two men were wrapped in blankets by the fire. Both were asleep. Beside them a radio bleated into a pop song, so thin that he knew its batteries were almost gone. As far as he could tell in the shadows, the men were strangers to him. But that didn’t mean they weren’t in the Company.
He stepped back, and back, watching them, but as they didn’t move except to breathe he let the darkness cover him and turned, facing out, into the wind. It hurtled itself against him like some beast; he held his arms out to it, wide, letting the rain hit him so hard he felt it would bruise him. All across the miles of the wide Somerset levels it roared, and he was the first thing it met, high in its wild, raging storm path, and above him the osprey soared, wings wide, and below the land was dark, the lights going out one by one as he put them out deliberately in his mind, like the candles in Bron’s banquet room.
And he saw Corbenic.
How could he have missed it?
It was huge, its windows blazed with light! No more than a mile away, it rose up out of the dark lands like a mass of granite, its walls and turrets outlined with torches, a vast castle, the only castle, a haphazard conglomerate of every castle he had ever seen, in every picture, film, book. It was a stronghold, invulnerable. Birds cawed and swirled over its highest pinnacles, sentinels patrolled its battlements. In its hundred courtyards horses were stabled. Blindfold hawks slept in its mews, cooks worked in its kitchens, a thousand servants, squires and serving maids, knights and women, poets and singers thronged its halls. This was how a castle should be.
And then the wind stung his eyes and it blurred and faded.
“Wait!” he shouted in panic. “Wait for me!”
“Cal.” Her voice was close behind him. He turned and she was there, in the old sweater and trousers that never seemed clean.
He stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“You always said that.”
“Did you think I never meant it?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, baffled. “I don’t know, do I! If you meant it, why did you go on drinking? Why didn’t you change? Why did you let the time go on, days, years, all that time. All the time that belonged to me! That should have been mine!” He was yelling, he knew. The wind took the words away as soon as he’d shouted them; it flung them out into the dark land.
His mother sat down on the grass, catching her hair to keep it from blowing across her eyes. “Because of the castle,” she said wonderingly, looking out at it. “That was the reason.” She smiled at him, and he saw she was calm, as she’d never been. “You see, Cal, I always thought they were voices but they weren’t. They were echoes. No one explained that to me. I was hearing them and they were real, but not in the way I thought. And I hated hearing them, so I did anything to get away, to drown them. And I’m sorry, Cal, love, because it was always you that got hurt. The fear was so stifling I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t. The voices were all the world, but that should have been you, my little boy, my son. All the things you missed out on, never did, never had. I can never give you that back, Cal.”
It was as if she was speaking about someone else. As if all that was over. Long finished.
“I should have come home,” he said bitterly.
She stood and reached out, her hand almost touching him. “When you left, all I thought of was your father. How he left. He never came back either.”
Cal closed his eyes; only a stinging second of darkness. When he opened them she wasn’t there, had never been there. The sudden emptiness of it was a torment, and he turned and looked out at the great castle, and suddenly tore the straps of the rucksack open and rummaged in it furiously, pulling out the crumpled card he had brought from the flat, with its childish rounded writing and the picture of the flowers, carefully drawn in crayon.
“Don’t go without this!” he screamed. He opened his hand, and the wind took it. In a flap of sound it was there and it was gone.
The castle went with it.
And when the urgent voice behind him said, “Stand still, Cal. You’re too near the edge,” he even smiled as he turned.
Kai stood in his dark coat beside the tower. Behind him, in a wide semicircle, were some of the Company—Gwrhyr, Owein, a dozen of the Sons of Caw. And Hawk.
Chapter Twenty-five
I am a messenger to thee from Arthur, to beg thee come and see him.
Peredur
Cal stepped back. Behind him the sheer slope of the hill plummeted into darkness.
Kai looked anxious. “We’re here to help.”
“Then leave me alone.” He glanced around at them. They were tense. They were afraid of what he might do. He realized how wild he must look and laughed, a hollow, vicious laugh that even scared him.
“For God’s sake, Cal,” Hawk said hoarsely. “We’re your friends. We just . . .”
“How did you know where to find me? Shadow?”
Kai flashed a glance at Hawk; the big man nodded. “You can’t blame her. She was worried.”
Cal shook his head, savoring the irony. So she had done it to him now. Stepped in, interfered. She had shown him what it felt like.
“Come back with us,” Kai said quietly. “You can stay at Caerleon. No questions, no bother. The Company will look after you.”
They only wanted to help; he knew that. So he said, “I can’t. I have to find this place. Corbenic. I’m close to it, I know I am.” He waved into the dark. “It’s out there. Just out there.”
Kai took a step to the side. “You say you’ve seen the Grail.”
“And I don’t suppose you believe me.”
The tall man laughed calmly. “On the contrary, Cal. We know about the Grail. The search for it goes on always. Don’t you think we haven’t searched for centuries? But then, you don’t believe us either, do you?”
For a long moment only the wind raged between them. Until Cal said, very quietly, “I believe you are who you think you are.” Then he turned, and stepped off the edge.
Hawk’s howl, the grab of his great hands, the thump of the grass: he remembered those, and then his whole body was out of control, a breathless, crashing, flailing roll down the sheer slope, banging, bruised, tumbled, flung out and smashed back against the ridges of the hill until he hit the stone and the night went black.
Maybe only for a second. Because when he came to, the pain was so intense he could hardly draw a breath, and he knew he’d broken a rib, maybe more than one. His arms and shoulders were so sore he groaned as he pushed himself up, but he could stand, and even run, in a doubled-up, uneven agony. The hill above him was alive with shouts and torches; they were coming down, skidding, wild with anxiety. He backed into a hedge, forced his way through, snapping the thick stalks of hemlock, wading through stiff grass.
“Cal!” Hawk’s shout was a nightmare of fear; gasping, Cal stumbled away from it, through a field into the garden of a cottage, deep in weeds. They must think he’d broken his neck. It was a miracle he hadn’t.