Out of the Dawn Light

NINE

Standing beside Sibert, Romain could almost feel the boy’s horror prickling against his skin. He waited. Instinct told him that anything he might try to say now, either in sympathy or in explanation, would either go unheard or else release the fury that was so evidently building up.

After an initial moan of distress, quickly suppressed, the girl, too, was silent.

Finally Sibert turned to him. The blue-green eyes burned with fire and he said, ‘Why did you not tell me? A word of warning about this — this catastrophe’ — he swept an arm in the direction of the sea, now deceptively calm as if for some reason wishing to disguise its furious, destructive potential — ‘would have prepared me!’

Trying to speak soothingly and reasonably, Romain said, ‘I did not think you would agree to come if I had spoken.’ He hesitated. Was it better to say what he had in mind, for it had to be said some time, or wait a while until Sibert was less emotional? He decided to speak. ‘Also, I feared that if I told you what has happened at Drakelow, you might have said you would no longer be able to locate the — the thing we seek.’

‘You feared right!’ Sibert shouted. Now both arms waved in the air, making great windmilling gestures expressive of his pain, his frustration and his despair. ‘How am I to begin to look, when half of the place I knew and loved has vanished beneath the sea?’

Romain made himself take several steadying breaths. Then he said, ‘The landfall is alarming, I admit, at first sight, but-’

‘Alarming!’ Sibert’s echo was harsh with sarcasm.

‘-but, if you give yourself time to consider what has been happening here, you will understand that it’s just another step in a process that has been going on for a very long time. The sea comes in hard out of the east, forced on by the winds, and-’

‘I don’t care,’ Sibert said coldly.

Romain cursed himself. Now was no time for wordy explanations. In a flash of memory he recalled his own reaction when he had first seen the apocalyptic damage. I must move the boy on from this, he thought. Putting some iron in his tone, he said firmly. ‘We have come here for a specific purpose. Yes, I admit that your role in our mission will be far more demanding now that the landscape has changed so drastically, but it is my belief that you can still perform it. I would not have brought you here otherwise.’

On Sibert’s other side, the girl moved closer to him and Romain heard her mutter something; it sounded like, I’ll help you all I can. Sibert turned and gave her a brief, absent smile.

‘We shall go up to the cliff edge — don’t worry, the drop is neither very far nor very steep — and we shall make ourselves comfortable in the sunshine,’ he went on, now subtly changing his tone so that it sounded as if he were a commander and the young people his troops. ‘You, Sibert, will look all around you and establish where you are in relation to how the lie of the land used to be. Then you will be able to work out the location of the spot you seek.’

There was a long pause. Then Sibert said, ‘Very well,’ and the three of them made their cautious way to the cliff edge.

Romain left Sibert and the girl sitting in the sunshine at the top of the low cliff. He had an idea that the boy would do better without him there. Also they were now in grave need of food and drink. Romain had resolved to trudge a mile or so inland to a small settlement that he knew of and see what he could purchase. He wrapped his stained old cloak around him, covering the rich fabric of his tunic. There was no need to dirty his face for he guessed it was already filthy, and he had several days’ growth of beard. It was highly unlikely that anyone would recognize Romain de la Flèche beneath the grime.

In any case, he had no option. The alternative was to collapse from exhaustion and dehydration.

I sat beside Sibert for what seemed ages after Romain set off. I wanted to comfort him, to help him, but he had shut me out and I could do neither. I hated sitting doing nothing; everything in me always seems to rebel at enforced idleness. I stared north, towards the town, then south, at the long coastline stretching into the far distance. I counted seabirds whose names I did not know. I wondered how long Romain was going to be finding food and drink; my stomach was hollow with hunger. Finally I counted the waves breaking with soft, hypnotic regularity on the shore below.

When eventually Sibert spoke, it made me jump.

‘The hall used to be there.’ He pointed.

I waited. When he did not elaborate, I prompted him. ‘And the treasure was kept in the hall?’

‘No, oh, no, it can’t have been.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘Our halls were always built for communal living and nobody in their right mind would hide a valuable object where there were constant comings and goings. The hiding place must surely have been in some secret location, Lassair. I did not even know there was need of such a hiding place until Romain told me about the — about the treasure. I’d never even heard of any treasure. I imagine that nobody was meant to know about it and no doubt the penalty for speaking of it was severe.’ He frowned, as if by keeping something so important so very secret his people had somehow let him down.

‘Did you really know nothing at all of this until Romain sought you out?’ I asked, although I felt that I already knew. If Sibert had discovered that there was a hidden treasure, undoubtedly he would have gone to hunt for it alone. Although there were those mysterious trips he admitted to have made to spy on his ancestral home. .

He smiled bleakly. ‘No, not really.’ He glanced at me briefly and, as if he read my mind, added, ‘It wasn’t why I kept coming here. I had heard whispers,’ he went on, ‘but the little I overheard made no sense. I’m not supposed to know anything at all. Hrype would kill me if he found out.’

‘I won’t tell him,’ I said fervently. I spat on my finger and drew it dramatically across my throat. ‘On my life.’

I don’t think he heard. He was far away, lost in memory. ‘I’ve always spied on Hrype,’ he said dreamily. ‘You would too, if you had to live with him. He’s just — weird, and he’s so secretive all the time that sometimes I- Well, once I woke in the night and he was in some sort of a trance. He was sitting cross-legged by the hearth, where a small fire burned. There was something smouldering on top of one of the logs and it gave off a really pungent smell. It gave me a headache, and I started to feel dizzy. Anyway, Hrype had his eyes almost closed, just slits showing between the lids, and he was muttering. Sort of chanting. I kept back in the shadows and tried to make out what he was saying and I realized with a shock that he was talking about Drakelow. Of course, I had to go on listening then because although I didn’t know a lot about it, I knew where and what it was and what it meant to my family.’

‘And he was speaking about the treasure?’ I butted in. I couldn’t help myself.

‘He must have been, although I didn’t realize it at the time. He was chanting to it, I think, as if the object was there before him and he was communicating with it. Sensing its power, perhaps.’ He shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t know, I don’t have Hrype’s knowledge or his gifts. But he spoke of something he referred to as the sea sanctuary. He talked to the thing, telling it that it was safe there in this sanctuary place because its location was a secret and quite soon it would be hidden for ever, and — oh!’

His gasp of realization came an instant after mine.

Sibert turned to me, wide eyed with awe. ‘He knew!’ he whispered. ‘He predicted this landfall!’

‘He did,’ I agreed. I was struck by a further thought. ‘Sibert, they must have known that this was going to happen, all those hundreds of years ago at the time the thing was put there in this sea-sanctuary place.’ I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as a shiver of atavistic dread went through me. To foresee the future with such clarity was quite alarming. But then a more prosaic explanation occurred to me. It was surely more likely that this eating away of the land by the sea had already been under way five hundred years ago. The men who had hidden their precious treasure had simply taken advantage of a natural phenomenon.

Edild once said to me that the best magicians maintain their scepticism and always keep one foot on the ground. My web of destiny might well show me to be earth-poor and not firmly grounded, but it didn’t mean I was totally lacking in common sense and logic.

I glanced at Sibert. He was shaking his head in wonder, his expression distant and dreamy.

Oh, dear. I was not at all sure he was open to common sense or logic just then.

‘So,’ I said brightly, ‘where and what was this sea sanctuary?’ He must have some idea, I thought. Not only that, he must have believed he could find it. Why else had he come along on this mission?

‘I think I know where it used to be,’ he said slowly. ‘When Romain approached me, my first thought was that the — the thing he was after must be whatever it was I overheard Hrype chanting about. I had no idea what it was but I had already worked out where and what the sea sanctuary must be. When Romain told me about the- When Romain explained, it — er, seemed as if everything suddenly fitted together,’ he finished lamely.

He was being deliberately vague. I was sure, however, what it was he was trying not to say: somehow Romain had discovered what Sibert had not. He might not know where this magical treasure was but he knew precisely what it was.

I thought about that. Romain knew what it was and Sibert knew roughly where it was, and they both needed me to pinpoint it for them. The thought gave me a warm glow of satisfaction.

‘Very well,’ I said, deliberately keeping my emotions out of my voice. ‘Where was it, this sea sanctuary, and what sort of a building was it?’

‘It was not a building. It was a circle of wooden posts, in the centre of which there was the stump of an oak tree, its trunk buried in the ground and its roots open to the air. It used to be some distance inland. Now’ — slowly he shook his head, as if he still could not absorb the vast change in the landscape — ‘now it’s out there somewhere.’ He waved an arm in a sweeping gesture towards the smooth sea, where no structure of any size or shape broke the surface for as far as the eye could see.

But I hardly registered his last words. I was almost in shock; I could not have been more amazed. What he had just described was a replica of one of the places Edild had told me about. It was up on the coast to the north of the Fens and one of the most sacred locations of our ancient ancestors. It was one of the deep mysteries — that much I knew. The upturned tree stump was a symbol of the link between the living and the dead; between us and the world of our ancestors, which was a mirror image of our own that co-existed beneath the earth, so that they walked the same ground as we did but upside down. It sounded quite bizarre to me and I was confused because I thought it was something to do with Yggdrasil, the world tree, but that, Edild said, was because I did not yet understand. How right she was. She had promised to take me to the sanctuary in the north one day when I was further advanced in my studies and, at my present lowly stage of learning, the prospect was more frightening than exciting.

Now it appeared that there was another such structure here at Drakelow. Well, I knew from my granny Cordeilla’s tales that the forefathers had lived on the coast at Dunwich, so it was possible. Did Edild know about this one? Had she seen it? If not, it was too late now because it had gone.

I realized suddenly what I should have appreciated straight away: Sibert’s people had not built their sea sanctuary. They had utilized a place of power that already existed, and had done so for thousands of years. Something about it had called out to them in their urgent need and they had responded.

I felt shaky with the impact of what I had just learned. I wished fervently that Edild were with me; she would have calmed me, helped me to understand and, I was quite sure, told me what I ought to do next. For I was — we were — faced with a problem. The place that Sibert must locate and where I must use my special skill was under the water and, for the present, I had no idea what we were going to do about it.

Then Sibert said matter-of-factly, ‘We’ll have to wait till low tide.’

I have already said that this was my first sight of the sea. I was an eel fisherman’s daughter and I knew how the water washed in and out of the creeks and the best time to hunt for eels. I knew about the sea — of course I did — but I did not know much about it. I certainly wasn’t relating this huge, gently moving expanse stretched before me with the tricky, treacherous, ever-changing waterways of the Fens.

I said, and I must have sounded so stupid, ‘What do you mean?’

And he told me.

Romain’s apprehension had grown to an alarming level by the time he got back to the cliff top. He tried to judge by the two figures sitting there so still, in surely exactly the positions they had occupied when he left, what the prevailing mood might be. Had Sibert recovered from the shock of seeing the landfall? Had he got his bearings, and could he lead the girl to the place where the thing was hidden?

Unable to contain himself, he broke into a run. Hearing him approach, Sibert turned round. ‘Oh, good,’ he said, ‘you’ve brought us our meal. Hurry up, Lassair and I are ravenous.’

Slowly Romain knelt down and, unfolding the linen wrapping, revealed bread, cuts of cold meat, a knuckle of ham, pickles, cheese, some tiny, wrinkled apples and a large sweet cake. He stared intently at Sibert and thought — hoped — he detected a smile. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

Sibert made him wait. He picked up some bread and hacked off a slice of ham, dipping it in the little pot of pickle. He took a huge bite, chewed vigorously and then through the food, said, ‘Lassair, have some, it’s delicious.’

‘Sibert, I-’ Romain began. He felt the blood surge into his face. He was on the verge of losing control.

‘It’s all right, Romain,’ the girl said. She had been eyeing him apprehensively and he wondered wryly if she feared for his health if he was made to wait in his agony of suspense much longer. ‘Sibert’s done it. He knows where the search must be carried out.’

Romain flung himself on the boy, hugging him and slapping him on the back. ‘I knew you could do it!’ he cried. ‘Didn’t I say so?’

‘Yes, Romain, you did,’ Sibert acknowledged.

He stood up again, surprised that they did not instantly do the same. ‘Come on, then!’ he said excitedly. ‘What are we waiting for?’

Sibert indicated the calm, silvery sea with the last portion of his bread and ham. ‘The tide.’

Romain looked out to where he was pointing. The new shoreline was already deep in shingle and the waves washing to and fro made a soft, hypnotic sound. There were at present some ten or twenty paces of exposed foreshore, littered with slabs of stone, pieces of tile, fragments of planking, beams and bolts of wood. It was not that long since the sea had swallowed its latest meal and the remnants were still being spat out. Beyond the foreshore a vague, circular shape was slowly appearing and suddenly Romain understood.

‘You mean — you’re saying it’s there?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘Under the sea?’

‘Under the sea now, yes,’ Sibert agreed, calmly helping himself to more bread and a chunk of cheese. ‘When the tide has gone out, it ought to be exposed. At least,’ he added cheerfully, ‘it might.’ He chewed reflectively for a while. ‘Otherwise, it’ll all depend on how long Lassair can hold her breath.’

They waited. The sun reached its zenith and began the long, slow descent into the west. Slowly, steadily, the sea fell back and the outline of the timber circle became clearer. At last Romain could contain himself no longer; he felt as if his blood was fizzing and frothing in his veins and he was light-headed and slightly nauseous.

He stood up, his head spinning. ‘We’re going down there,’ he said decisively, fighting the vertigo. ‘Come on.’

Giving his companions no time to protest, he led them away. The cliff was less than a man’s height here, the ground soft and crumbly. There was a place nearby where a stream must once have cut its way down through the newly exposed soil, and they paused to inspect its now bone-dry course. It would be easier to go that way than trying to drop straight down the cliff. Low it might be, but all the same an awkward fall could have broken an ankle. Romain went first, turning to hold out a hand to the girl, but with a faint shake of her head she declined his help and scrambled down on her own, jumping the last few feet and landing neatly like a cat. Sibert followed, sliding on his backside and setting off a small avalanche of earth and pebbles.

The cliff, Romain reflected anxiously, was indeed deeply unstable. .

They struck out across the spoil from the cliff and presently it gave way to shingle. Romain, his eyes fixed on the strange circle of ancient timbers straight ahead of him, worn by time to stark fragments, hardly noticed when he reached the first of the little pools left behind by the retreating tide. Soon his boots were soaked and he felt the sharp sting as salt water found the raw skin under his burst blister.

Now he was intent on the peculiar upturned tree stump that, with a vague sense of menace, squatted in the middle of the timber circle. Its roots were spread wide, held up to the summer sky like arms reaching out in supplication. A sudden huge shiver ran through him, all the way from his head to his toes. It had nothing to do with the chill of the water now surging around his ankles; it was fear, pure and simple. We should not be here, he thought. It is a forbidden place and there is danger lurking.

It seemed to him as he splashed through the shallow waves that all at once the bright sun faded. Looking up in alarm, expecting to see a black storm cloud coming up against the wind, he was amazed to see that the sky was still clear, undisturbed blue.

But he was in shadow; he knew it.

Another shiver ran through him. Get away, a voice seemed to whisper inside his head. Go, while you still can.

He stopped dead.

Sibert came up behind him, panting. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘We should hurry — we’ve left it too late and I think the tide’s turning.’

Romain looked up. Was Sibert right? He did not know. But the sea seemed to be pushing hard against his legs. Then his mission and its vital importance broke through the enchantment and he said roughly, ‘Come, then.’

He waded inside the timber circle.

Sibert was right beside him. The girl, hampered by having to hold up her long skirts, was still several paces behind.

Romain made himself wait in silence. Sibert stood quite still, looking around him. He was sensing the place, Romain thought. He would not necessarily know straight away where to tell the girl to start looking. He would probably have to poke around and find the most likely area within the circle. And what of her? Romain shot a surreptitious glance at the girl, whose face was white and set. How close did she have to be to an object before she could pick up its presence?

So many questions, he thought in frustration. And all he could do was wait for the other two to act. Impotent, he clenched his hands into fists.

Sibert was walking around the circle, stopping by each ruined timber post to push his hands down under the rapidly deepening water. Romain watched him, aching to order him to hurry up. Then Sibert went to the upturned stump. Now he knelt down in the water, leaning forward and supporting himself on one hand while with the other he explored the gnarled and sodden surface of the tree that had died in another age of the world.

His frown of concentration was suddenly replaced by a different expression.

‘What is it?’ Romain cried, hurrying to crouch beside him, sending up a wash that drenched Sibert to the waist. With a curse, Sibert straightened up, scowling at Romain.

‘You’ve soaked me!’ he complained.

‘What did you find?’ Romain shouted. ‘Have you got it?’

But Sibert shook his head. ‘No. I had something, though, or I thought I had. There was — I don’t know how to describe it. I was feeling down the tree trunk and I found a line that felt as if it was too straight to be natural. I was trying to see if it could be the outline of a recess of some sort when you came over and now’ — he was once more feeling about beneath the water — ‘now I’ve lost it.’ He sent Romain an accusatory glare.

Romain wasted no time on apology or recrimination. Spinning round, he called to the girl. She was standing outside the timber circle and she had her back to him. He thought for a moment that she was moving away, but that couldn’t have been right. ‘Come here and see if you can detect anything,’ he called urgently. ‘Over here, on this side of the stump. Sibert thinks there may be a hidden opening and-’

She turned round and he saw her face.

It was deadly pale, and the grey-green eyes that had turned to silver in the light off the water were wide with fear. ‘We cannot stay here,’ she said, her voice an anguished whisper as if it were vital that nobody overheard. ‘There is death here and we are in its shadow.’

He heard her words, which so faithfully echoed what he had sensed only moments before, in a kind of numb horror.

Death. Shadow.

But the thing I have come to find is almost within my grasp!

‘We must go on looking!’ he shouted. He lunged towards her, intent on grabbing her and forcing her inside the circle. She saw what he was going to do and, turning, splashed back towards the shore, skirts trailing in the water. Romain went to go after her but then a sudden very cold wind blasted out of the east and with it the speed of the incoming tide picked up alarmingly.

Sibert was at his side, and he had a firm grip on Romain’s sleeve. ‘I don’t want to drown even if you do!’ he yelled. ‘It’s madness to stay out here — we’ll be out of our depth very soon and there’s already a vicious current pulling at our legs. Hurry!’

Still Romain pulled against him, drawn to that unearthly stump and whatever it held inside itself as if it had cast a monstrous, invisible net over him and was slowly drawing him in.

Another powerful wave hit him in the back of the legs and he would have fallen but for Sibert holding him up. Salt water splashed up into his face and went up his nose and into his open, gasping mouth. Coughing, choking on the harsh brine, at last he allowed Sibert to drag him away.

The first attempt had failed.