Corbenic

Chapter Twenty

“If thou go there, thou wilt not come back alive.”

“Wilt thou be a guide to me there?” asked Peredur.

“I will show thee a way,” said she.

Peredur

She was screaming at him. It happened; usually she was tearful and slurred her speech, but sometimes, without warning, she was screaming. Only now it was in some other language, French maybe, and he couldn’t understand it. They were in Trevor’s immaculate room, and she snatched up the Greek vase from the glass table and threw it; it smashed in pieces against the pale walls.

Cal said, “Look. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.” It was what he always said. Soothing noises. Anything.

He couldn’t remember how the row had started. But it was his fault. He knew that.

She flung a glass at him; he ducked and Guinness spattered the wall. He stared at it in horror. Now she was throwing cushions, and an ashtray, and the radio, which crashed into the glass shelves and brought the whole lot down on top of him, a showering of light fragments, cold, cutting.

She was screaming in his ears, close to his face.

He opened his eyes.

The wind. It was the wind, howling, and it was snow that was falling on him; snow that had drifted in a great scatter from the laden branches of the hedge. He groaned, wormed farther in, sweating despite the raw weather. He didn’t want to wake, because that meant the cold came back, the terrible ache in his fingers, the numbness of his face, the shivering. But if he slept even for a moment he dreamed, and the dreams were worse, they were a torment, and there was no way away from them.

Curled, he closed his eyes tight, feeling the tiny rustle of dried leaves against his cheek, the icy mud soft and yielding, the infinitesimal patter of snow. All across the fields it was falling, tiny hard flakes, and it was settling and not melting, and since late that afternoon the land had been turning white. Only the trees were dark; stark leafless shapes.

It was his third night in the dark land. Or third week? For a moment he couldn’t remember and snapped his eyes open in alarm, staring at the black thorns and briars above him.

He had been walking so long his body ached and his legs felt trembly; he had been hungry days ago but that had gone now, leaving a sort of light-headed emptiness. The food had more or less run out; he had some hazelnuts and rock-hard cheese but those had to be kept. Supplies. He grinned, weakly. Like the games he had played years back, with the other kids in the park. Survival. Camouflage.

Snow drifted into his eyes. He closed them again, and the darkness seemed warmer.

Shadow and Hawk were pulling him into the van. It was a long way up, there were too many steps, and over the door was a sign saying VACANCIES. It made him laugh; he couldn’t stop. Weakly he giggled, and Shadow snapped, “What? What’s so funny?” But before he could tell her, the microwave pinged, and Hawk went to it.

“No!” Cal jumped up out of the warm chair. “Don’t open that!”

Slowly, with a deliberate grin, Hawk opened it. Fish poured out, a shining, slithering, stinking mass. They cascaded out, onto the floor, filling the van up, more and more of them, and Leo flung his net out and Bron sat in the boat and said, “One day, we may catch a real treasure, a fish with a ring in its belly. Like the old tales.”

Cal sat up, pushing the fish away, and his hands were cold and the icy mush plopped and slid. He was on a slab in a market stall. He was under the hedge. He was freezing.

Get up. Get up and walk. You had to. If you didn’t you’d go to sleep and never wake up, all the books told you that. Find shelter. Light a fire.

He staggered up, scratching his face on the brambles. The rucksack was light; he barely felt it now as he flung it on and climbed out of the ditch. At once the wind struck him. He bent, wrapping his arms around his body, clutching his thin coat tight, struggling over the humped, tussocky, boggy field. There had to be a road, a way back.

But he had been looking forever. It was as if he had entered some other world. This was not Wales. This was not England. He had fallen into the crack between them. He had walked off the map. There were no birds and no houses. In the night no lights shone, not even the distant red glimmer of town streetlights reflecting on cloud. He had walked on and on in a landscape of overgrown meadows and desolate hillsides, of small, cascading streams, bitter cold to drink from, tasting of ice. Long ago he had told himself he was a fool, and had tried to head back to the road, but there was no road, anywhere, anymore, and none of the maps were any use because this place was not real anyway. He had burned them, crouching in a small copse, holding his swollen fingers over the useless yellow flames.

Once a knight had jumped out from under a stone, and fought him. He had the bruises. He knew it had happened.

And now there were these sheep. A field of them, white sheep, and then a river, narrow and stony, and beyond it a field sloping, and the sheep in that were all black. As he stumbled down the frozen slope he saw a white ewe cross the stream, slithering in and splashing across. It came out, and it was black. It cropped the grass. He stopped dead, watching. After a while a black sheep came this way. It came out of the water white. His eyes had been on it all the time. He hadn’t seen when it changed.

Taking a drink from the plastic water bottle, he rubbed a hand down his stubbly face and walked on. His lips felt cracked; his skin raw with the frost. As he walked among them the sheep moved apart, watching, chewing solidly, and at the stream he knelt and fearfully touched the surface with his finger. The rocky bed had a reddish tinge. Weeds hung under it.

He stood up, and waded across.

Did he change? He was colder, certainly; he shivered, his feet were soaked, and there were holes in the cheap boots that he hadn’t noticed before.

The land had changed though, it was steeper and rockier, and there were mountains now; it was darker. Time had passed. Where had it gone?

And a tree on the bank of a different river was burning, root to tip, half in leaf and half in flames, and as he backed around its trunk the heat of it scorched him, and on the leafy side birds sang, unsinged.

The sky darkened, lit, darkened. Moon and stars flashed over him; the sun circled like a hidden eye, watching.

He was wandering in his own delirium, his own nightmares. Sometimes he didn’t know if he walked awake or asleep; people opened secret doors in his head and came out and were trudging with him; Kai once, and the Grail girl, wrapped in a green brocade cloak, nagging at him. And behind him, always, so that he didn’t even have to turn and check she was there anymore, walked his mother, her hair with strange blond highlights that didn’t suit her, her clothes new, a red skirt, a gray sweater, and no mud on her, and no snow.

She pursued him; stumbling on the furrows, he knew she was there and said, “Leave me alone.”

But she only answered what she always answered, a whisper that was almost a threat. “I love you, Cal.”

He tripped and fell, full length in the dark, a jarring thud. Breathless, he lay there. He wouldn’t get up. He couldn’t. His eyes were blind with water, hot tears that swelled from somewhere deep; he sobbed silently, then aloud, a yell of anguish.

“Bron!” he screamed. “I’m here! I’m looking for you! I can’t do anymore.”

Silence. Only the hiss of snow. And far off, the faint creaking of burdened trees, an eerie, terrible sound.

Cal pulled himself up on knees and elbows, a convulsion of despair. “For God’s sake show me the way out!”

The reply came from behind him. With a gasp he whipped around, saw the glimmer of it move down the hedgerow. An animal. Big. Four legs. He scrambled up. It was hard to see, in the driving snow. White. A deer. A dog?

Floundering, he dragged his feet out of the mud and went after it, crazily swaying, because it would have shelter, it might be a farm dog, there might be a lighted window and a door that would open for it, a voice, calling out, a fire.

Snow drifted in his face. Wiping it away he slid and hurried down the rough grass slope, the blur of white far in front, and as it jumped the ditch into the copse down there he was sure it was a sheep, but when he reached the frozen reeds and crunched over them, lurching on the tilted slabs, he caught sight of it again, a narrow face, and it was slimmer, a white deer. It turned and entered the wood. With barely a hesitation, he went after it.

Usually, he avoided woods. They were too silent. You never knew what might be lurking in them. But now he went straight on, ducking under the low outer branches of pliant hazel, the snow dusting down on his head and shoulders. It was dark. There was no wind in here. Ahead, lost in shadows, the animal rustled.

He had to fight his way through, thorns snagging him and briars whipping back to scratch his face, and he was sure, suddenly and joyfully, that he was in the right place. The garden at Corbenic had been like this; he’d had to fight his way out, and that strange, childish idea came back to him of the castle in the fairy tale, hidden behind its tangle of growth.

His foot slipped; he reached out to steady himself. He caught hold of something slim and tall, a pole. As his hand came away it was wet and sticky with some dark mess; he jerked back, hissing with terror, rubbing his palm frantically on his sleeve, because into his mind with lightning clarity had come the image of the spear that bled. Then, carefully, he looked closer. It was a broken fence. Long ruined. Bending, he scraped through.

On the other side, a green mass rose up in front of him: ivy-covered walls, ghostly now with a phosphorescence of snow, ruinous and shapeless.

Just at his right, a small panting sound. In the dark, his fingers stretched out, groping, searching; he almost dreaded what he would touch, but when he found it it was a familiar shock, the slightly greasy wet fur, the lick of a hot rough tongue. A dog.

The dog did not bark, or whimper. It moved, padding and snuffling its way through the undergrowth, and Cal went with it, whispering, “Wait. Wait, boy,” terrified that it would leave him.

Under the walls of the building they went, a progression of rustles, and when Cal paused and hissed, “Where are you?” the night was silent. But not dark.

Light was coming from somewhere above him; he looked up and saw the moon, the frostiest of crescents, caught in a sudden gap of cloud, and the moon shone on an image that seemed to hang in the black and silver of the walls, an image of a golden cup, held in two hands.

For a second it was there. Then the cloud fragmented; the darkness was a window, its stained glass broken, a patchwork of vacancies and facets of ice, seated figures, a shattered supper.

This was not Corbenic. It was some sort of chapel.

Cal crouched by the wall, his breath a cloud. He was ill with disappointment; it overwhelmed him like the blackness over the moon. It darkened his whole mind.

The rough tongue licked his hand.

The thought came, out of what seemed a deep well of pain, that at least there might be a roof, some shelter, so he stood and groped for a doorway, found a pointed arch swathed thick with ivy and bindweed and stinging nettles and holly.

Ducking under, he saw the chapel was a green bower of growth. It stank of damp and mildew and mold. Weeds had climbed all over it, sprouted and tangled; the roof was a web of snow-littered branches. And under them, in the farthest corner, a fire was crackling.

The dog crossed a slant of moonlight, a slither of darkness. It nosed and snuffled a huddle of shadow. And the shadow raised its head and said, “So I haven’t left my moulting cage in vain.”