The Lost Labyrinth

II

Gaille began to hear a strange rushing noise as she climbed higher, like a river in full flood. She laboured on upwards for a few more minutes, her legs burning and trembling with tiredness, before she discovered what it was-wind funnelling through a narrow pass between two high peaks. Grey clouds had gathered at the mouth, like disheartened ghosts outside the gates of purgatory, waiting to be let in.

It quickly grew chilly, all that cold air channelling through this narrow gap, the wind whipping at her back, making a mockery of her cotton blouse, flapping her trousers around her ankles. Shivers turned to shudders; she daydreamed of jerseys and thick jackets. Visibility deteriorated too; in places, the cloud was thick as a fogbank. They reached a barbed wire fence, its wooden stakes grotesquely topped by goat skulls, voodoo fetishes to warn off unwanted visitors. 'You sure we're not trespassing?' she asked.

'Don't worry about it,' Iain assured her. He trod down on the topmost strand so that the stakes either side leaned deferentially towards him, then helped her across. 'Trust me. I walk these mountains all the time. As long as you behave yourself, anyone you meet will be glad of the company. Besides, this has to be Petitier's land by now, and he's hardly going to complain, is he?'

The pass was treacherous with loose landslide cobbles, meaning Gaille had to keep her eyes down to mind her footing. She lost track of Iain in the thick mist, but assumed he was ahead of her. She'd been walking for a couple of minutes when she heard Iain shouting anxiously. 'Gaille! Where are you?'

'Here,' she replied. 'Why?'

'Be careful. I think we're near the edge of something.'

'The edge of what?' A gust of wind answered the question for her, thinning the cloud momentarily, revealing the pass falling away a few steps ahead to a sudden vertiginous drop. She stopped dead, took a step back. 'Hell!' she said. 'You must be psychic.'

He appeared out of the mist, led by her voice. 'You get a sense for these things if you do enough hiking.' He led her left, away from the centre of the pass. The wind slackened at once, and the cloud thinned and then vanished, allowing some welcome sunshine through, and also revealing what she'd briefly glimpsed: that they were on the rim of a natural amphitheatre of rock, like the caldera of some extinct volcano. There was a fertile circle at its foot far below, perhaps two or even three kilometres in diameter, divided into fields and groves, with a great yellow sea of gorse away to its north. A farmhouse stood in the approximate centre of this plateau, too distant to make out in any detail, other than for a black water tower on its roof and the glint of solar panels. And, beyond the farmhouse, two of those ugly polythene greenhouses. 'What now?' she asked, daunted by the natural stockade of escarpment walls.

'There has to a path somewhere. If Petitier can make it in and out with a mule, surely we can too.'

'I don't know,' she said.

'Trust me,' he insisted. 'It'll be fine.'

Trust me, she thought, a touch sourly. It seemed to be his answer for everything.