The woman said, “He’s taken Rob into the Unworld with him. Our people are ringed around the henge. He’ll get her out. This is possible. It can be done. You must believe me.”
Rosa, her name is. She grabbed my hand.
I let her. I said calmly, “Nothing will be turned off until we know it’s too late.”
In my pocket, the rosary was twined around my fingers like ivy.
I know why the hill resounds.
The ground was rising, but still marshy. Plumes of gas plopped from it and hung, shimmering with a pale green phosphorescence, stinking of rot. As Rob strode after Vetch, he knew that he was worn with exhaustion and worry, that they had scrambled for hours through stands of oak and rowan, only to reach this place where every growth seemed stunted and dwarfish, twisted in brackish mire.
Since they’d left the caer there had been no sign of Clare. Twice Vetch had turned and called out to her, “Goddess! Please!” But nothing had moved down the long aisles of the wood. Now, deep in mist, Vetch paused for breath. He gasped. “The stars.”
The sky seemed closer. The summer constellations hung unmoving, the Milky Way a glimmer. For a moment Rob had no idea what was different; then his heart gave a leap of fear.
Night. From far in the west, darkness was spreading, a real midnight blackness; in his mind, Rob mixed it on the palette. “I thought you said—”
“The Unworld changes. Someone is controlling this.” Vetch mused, arms folded. “Rob,” he said reluctantly, “why would she want to stay?”
Rob tugged one boot out of the mire. “She’s always been a bit … stubborn.” He thought of her suddenly, of the time they’d been messing around with the radio, each trying to snatch it, and it had got broken. Her blurted, hot rage. I always get the blame for everything.
And he had kept quiet, and let it happen.
Vetch was watching. Not wanting to talk, Rob marched on.
Birds were moving. For the first time since entering the Unworld, Rob became aware of its hidden life. A heron flew above the trees, its slow wing flap terrifying. A tiny lizard, black as velvet, streaked across the path.
They walked through a stand of beech, all brown and crisp leaved, into a place where there was grass, soft mossy grass, with tiny closed blue flowers, and bracken.
Trickling through it, shallow and almost silent, clogged with algae and winding water reed, was a small river.
Vetch stopped, waist high in the umbels of cow parsley.
Rob came past him, astonished.
He knew this place.
It was near Silbury Hill, on the banks of the Kennet. When he was small, they’d had picnics here, his mother and him, and Chloe, only a little girl. Jam sandwiches and chips and little cakes from the baker’s. Sticky orange juice, striped straws that tangled.
He stood and stared. Three bright yellow plastic plates lay on the grass. On one a silver paper wrapping was crinkled up into a ball. He knelt and picked it up. Next to it a dented Frisbee lay, near the nettle patch Chloe had stung her hand in.
“You recognize this?” Vetch said.
“Of course! It’s near Swallowhead Spring.” He shook his head. “But there wasn’t a forest anywhere near; just a cornfield on the other bank there, and some trees, a hedge—”
“Was Chloe with you?”
“Yes.” He was staring at the nettles. They were enormous. Vast spines sprouted from their stems, each with a gleaming pinprick of venom.
Vetch said, “Rob, think. How long ago?”
“About six years. She was … six, seven? She stung her hand....”
The poet crossed to the nettles and crouched by them, careful not to touch. “So I see,” he said, and at the same time a sound rang out, making them both jerk their heads up. A horn, blowing. Echoing and strange, it boomed over the river.
Vetch turned abruptly. “We’re moving through Chloe’s mind. Deeper and deeper, as we follow her through the circles of the caers. She remembers this place; that’s why it’s here. Her clearest memory is of the nettles, which is why they’re so enormous. It’s a child’s terror.”
“But it’s a real place.” Rob nodded toward the willows on the bank. “Just through there, and over the stream, is Silbury.”
Without a word, Vetch stood and pushed through the silvery branches.
Rob followed. He almost had to crawl in places, the network of pliant twigs scraping his back. Once, Vetch snagged the crane-skin bag, and tugged it free. Then he wriggled through a screen of leaves.
When Rob emerged after him, the poet was standing a little way ahead.
In front of them, over a lake of crystal clear water, rose a white, gleaming hill, smooth as a seashell. Around its sides crawled a chalk road, rising in terraces.
Vetch nodded, as if he understood. “Spiral Castle,” he said.
“You’re wrong.” Chloe stood up and marched around the crazily tilted room. “I only did it because if they’d hurt you, I would have felt it was my fault. That’s all. Blame Mac for lecturing me. He’s my godfather. Well, almost my godfather.”
In this caer there was no furniture. There were only seashells, vast and in heaps.
The King lay in an enormous oyster, eating cockles with a pin. As always his face was a mystery, but there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice.
“The truth is you’re beginning to like me. The prisoner always grows to like her captor.”
“I’m not!” She kicked the shells, wishing there were windows instead of the gleaming mother-of-pearl walls. “I hate you.”
“So you’ll escape again?”
“I might.”
He nodded, then swung his feet down and looked up at her. “If you hadn’t come back they would have given me to the forest, Chloe,” he said soberly.
“Who were they?” She came and crouched on the floor. “I couldn’t see much. The man with the candles had his back to me and the light was dazzling.”
“Intruders. They’ve broken in from above, found a hole that I thought was sealed centuries ago. There are three of them. I call them the Roebuck, the She-hound, and the Plover. Because these are some of the shapes they shift into. In the legends of Annwn they always come when the trees move. They’ll try and take you away and lead the trees against me.”
She snorted. “The trees seem to be doing a fair job by themselves.”
For a moment she sensed his old fear; then he shrugged and settled back into the shiny hollow. “Not here. Here the lake will keep them out.”
She stood, one hand on the pearl-smooth wall.
They had crossed the lake in a boat made of what seemed like an enormous yellow plastic cup, with an oar like a bent spoon; there were no bridges, he told her. Then he had drawn the boat up, and before she could stop him, he had taken a stone and smashed a great crack in the bottom, and it had filled with water and sunk with barely a gurgle.
Annoyed, she had stormed in front of him up the chalk path.
It had spiraled around the hill, a white track that soon left her breathless. Wind had gusted against her, stinging her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. On each side of the path a border of pearls gleamed, like the double rope Dad had given Mum last Christmas, and between them some small white things that had seemed so puzzlingly familiar she had had to kneel and pick one up. Light, desiccated pieces of crust.
Breadcrumbs?
Coming behind her, he had laughed.
But once at the top, the view had dismayed them both.
As far as she could see in every direction, the forest marched. To the north it rose up to crown a low hill and to the east a ridge, long and narrow. It was as if the Spiral Caer was at the bottom of a shallow bowl of woodland, deep in a cauldron of trees.