As soon as he saw it, he recognized it.
It was the passage of the long barrow at West Kennet, barely a mile from Darkhenge. For a moment he thought with joy he was out, that he was back in the world, but when he turned he saw the King crouched there, and behind him the paneled corridor with its ruined paintings.
Ducking into the first side chamber, Rob saw bones. They lay in a heap, and he knew this must have been how it was before the tomb was excavated, how the remains of its builders had lain here for millennia, sealed in the earth, because he’d read it umpteen times on the notice outside. Skulls and long bones, sorted neatly in piles.
He and Chloe had played in here. Hide and seek. Jumping out and scaring each other.
He drew back, walked on. Two chambers on each side, and then the last, a corbeled roof, the huge slabs of the rounded sides.
He crept into the burial chamber, alert for her yell in his ear, her weight on his back.
It was empty.
And there was no way out.
“Why should I make a truce with you?” Clare stepped back.
Vetch came up to her and held her arms. “Because if we don’t, they’ll become as we are. Hating, loving, never forgiving. I know how he’ll feel, all his life, if she dies. There will be no way he can make it up to her, the neglect, the way he let his art swallow up his life. I know how that feels.”
She went to pull back but his grip was firm. “So you should,” she whispered.
He smiled. “‘A hen devoured me. I rested nine nights in her womb, a child. I have been dead. I have been alive. I am Taliesin.’”
Clare looked away. Then, barely heard, she breathed, “For the girl’s sake then.”
Chloe had dissolved the wall of the burial chamber and made the slabs slide into place behind her. Now she was deep in the forest; it was dark all around her, and she was getting tired of the dark. So she made the moon rise. It came up like a wobbling silver globe behind the trees. That was good.
And she was tired of walking too. The sixth caer might be miles away. So she whistled.
Through the rustling forest a soft clinking answered, and a thud, deep in leaf drift. A white shape detached itself from darkness, vanished, then reappeared between the tree trunks.
Chloe laughed and ducked under the branches, running down a thread of path out into a clearing, where a white horse looked up from grazing, whinnied, and shook its mane.
She gave a great, screeching whoop of joy.
“Callie! Callie, it’s you!”
The King said, “We’re trapped.”
“You’re a great help.” Rob turned. He looked back up the corridor past the paintings. Then he yelled, “Mac!”
Something rattled and slid.
“MAC! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
If he could, there was no answer. Only a whine. At first it came from the roof, then it grew louder, emanating from the walls, a deafeningly horrible monotone, a grinding flat line of sound that made Rob clamp his hands over his ears in agony. “What is that? What is that?”
The King looked around in despair. “A machine. An alarm.”
Rob stared at him in disbelief. “Chloe’s monitors! Oh my God! She’s making them think she’s dying!”
I. IDHO: YEW
It was Rob. Somewhere close, unmistakable.
“Can you hear me?” he yelled. I was praying, and my eyes jerked wide, but before I could breathe, everything crashed. Breathing, heart rate. We got Katie out, sobbing, screaming. Nurses ran in, carrying pieces of equipment, shoving me back.
I feel heavy and clumsy and useless.
She isn’t breathing, she isn’t warm. Her face is white and tiny.
The line on the monitor is as flat as despair.
They’ve turned off the alarm, but the silence is worse, and Katie is staring at Rosa, over John’s shoulder, knowing their little girl is slipping away.
“Who are all these people, Mac?” she sobs.
There is nothing in which I have not existed.
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.