Labyrinth

CHAPTER 16

It was eleven o’clock when Alice reached the outskirts of Toulouse. She was too tired to carry on to Carcassonne, so she decided to head for the city center and find somewhere to stay the night.

The journey had passed in a flash. Her head was full of jumbled images of the skeletons and the knife beside them; the white face looming out at her in the dead gray light; the body lying in front of the church in Foix. Was he dead?

And the labyrinth. Always, in the end, she came back to the labyrinth. Alice told herself she was being paranoid, that it was nothing to do with her. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But no matter how many times she said it, Alice did not believe it.

She kicked off her shoes and lay down fully clothed on the bed. Everything about the room was cheap. Featureless plastic and hardboard, gray tiles and fake wood. The sheets were overstarched and scratched like paper against her skin.

She took the Bushmills single malt from her rucksack. There were a couple of fingers left in the bottle. Unexpectedly a lump came to her throat. She’d been saving the last couple of inches for her last night at the dig. She tried again, but Shelagh’s phone was still on divert. Fighting back her irritation, she left yet another message. She wished Shelagh would quit playing games.

Alice washed down a couple of painkillers with the whisky, then got into bed and turned the light off. She was totally exhausted, but she couldn’t get comfortable. Her head was throbbing, her wrist felt hot and swollen and the cut on her arm was hurting like hell. Worse than ever.

The room was stuffy and hot. After tossing and turning, listening to bells strike midnight, then one o’clock, Alice got up to open the window and let some air in. It didn’t help. Her mind wouldn’t stay still. She tried to think of white sands and clear blue water, Caribbean beaches and Hawaiian sunsets, but her brain kept coming back to the gray rock and chill subterranean air of the mountain.

She was scared to sleep. What if the dream came back again?

The hours crawled by. Her mouth was dry and her heart staggered under the influence of the whisky. Not until the pale white dawn crept under the worn edges of the curtains did her mind finally give in.

This time, a different dream.

She was riding a chestnut horse through the snow. Its winter coat was thick and glossy, and its white mane and tail were plaited with red ribbons. She was dressed for hunting in her best cloak with the squirrel-fur pelisse and hood and long leather gloves lined with marten fur that went up as high as her elbows.

A man was riding beside her on a gray gelding, a bigger, more powerful animal with a black mane and tail. He pulled repeatedly on the reins to keep it steady. His brown hair was long for a man, skimming his shoulders. His blue velvet cloak streamed behind him as he drove his mount on. Alice saw he wore a dagger at his waist. Around his neck was a silver chain with a single green stone hanging from it, which banged up and down against his chest to the rhythm of the horse.

He kept glancing over at her with a mixture of pride and ownership. The connection between them was strong, intimate. In her sleep, Alice shifted position and smiled.

Some way off, a horn was blowing sharp and shrill in the crisp December air, proclaiming that the hounds were on the trail of a wolf. She knew it was December, a special month. She knew she was happy.

Then, the light changed.

Now she was alone in a part of the forest she did not recognize. The trees were taller and more dense, their bare branches black and twisted against the white, snow-laden sky, like dead men’s fingers. Somewhere behind her, unseen and threatening, the dogs were gaining on her, excited by the promise of blood.

She was no longer the hunter, but the quarry.

The forest reverberated with a thousand thundering hooves, getting closer and closer. She could hear the baying of the huntsmen now. They were shouting to one another in a language she did not understand, but she knew they were looking for her.

Her horse stumbled. Alice was thrown, falling forward out of the saddle and down to the hard, wintry ground. She heard the bone in her shoulder crack, then searing pain. She looked down in horror. A piece of dead wood, frozen solid like the head of an arrow, had pierced her sleeve and impaled her arm.

With numb and desperate fingers, Alice pulled at the fragment until it came loose, closing her eyes against the aching pain. Straight away, the blood started to flow, but she couldn’t let that stop her.

Staunching the bleeding with the hem of her cloak, Alice scrambled to her feet and forced herself on through the naked branches and petrified undergrowth. The brittle twigs snapped under her feet and the ice-cold air pinched her cheeks and made her eyes water.

The ringing in her ears was louder now, more insistent, and she felt faint. As insubstantial as a ghost.

Suddenly, the forest was gone and Alice found herself standing on the edge of a cliff. There was nowhere left to go. At her feet was a sheer drop to a wooded precipice below. In front of her were the mountains, capped with snow, stretching as far as the eye could see. They were so close she felt she could almost reach out and touch them.

In her sleep, Alice shifted uneasily.

Let me wake up. Please.

She struggled to wake up, but she couldn’t. The dream held her too tightly in its coils.

The dogs burst out of the cover of the trees behind her, barking, snarling. Their breath clouded the air as their jaws snapped, drools of spit and blood hanging from their teeth. In the gathering dusk, the tips of the huntsmen’s spears glinted brightly. Their eyes were filled with hate, with excitement. She could hear them whispering, jeering, taunting her.

“Heretique, heretique.”

In that split second, the decision was made. If it was her time to die, it would not be at the hands of such men. Alice lifted her arms wide and jumped, commending her body to the air.

Straight away, the world fell silent.

Time ceased to have any meaning as she fell, slowly and gently, her green skirts billowing out around her. Now she realized there was something pinned to her back, a piece of material in the shape of a star. No, not a star but a cross. A yellow cross. Kouelle. As the unfamiliar word drifted in and then out of her mind, the cross came loose and floated away from her, like a leaf dropping from a tree in autumn.

The ground came no nearer. Alice was no longer afraid. For even as the dream images started to splinter and break apart, her subconscious mind understood what her conscious mind could not. That it was not her- Alice-who fell, but another.

And this was not a dream, but a memory. A fragment from a life lived a long, long time ago.