Ysabel Read online

  “They’re going to kill it,” she breathed.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He saw the golden figure unhook the axe from his belt. A sound came from the figures around him.

  This was a sacrifice, Ned understood. What else could it be? Tonight was the beginning of summer’s season, hinge of the year in the days when these people and those who preceded and followed them—here and elsewhere—shaped their rites of goddess and god, fertility and death.

  Here and elsewhere, Ned thought. Wales, too. His own people, his mother’s. His grandmother’s.

  They would have to go quickly as soon as the man in front of them went up. Ned wasn’t sure why he believed he could do that—just walk up—but what could Ned properly understand about this, anyhow?

  He knew some things, but he didn’t know how he knew them, and it didn’t seem to be helping with anything that mattered. Once they got out, if they got out, it would matter less. Wouldn’t it? It would be over.

  “Hot-and-sour soup,” he muttered.

  In reply, Kate Wenger giggled, amazingly. Then, after a pause, she moved their linked hands up to her mouth and bit his knuckle. Ned’s heart thumped, for different reasons than before.

  “Behave, you,” she said softly.

  “Me?” he murmured, genuinely startled—and aroused.

  But in that same moment he did have a new thought, and felt a hard kick of fear. Something slid into place: he was pretty sure he finally knew what was going on with Kate.

  He was about to say it, but stopped himself. What was the point? He couldn’t do anything about it. They just had to get out, for one more reason now, if he was right.

  The three men leading the bull had now reached the one with the axe. They stopped in front of him. The white bull stopped. The smaller man in white stood to one side, holding something. There was silence.

  Then Ned saw all the figures gathered there bow to the animal, as they had not bowed to the man.

  The broad-shouldered figure spoke then, for the first time. Ned remembered that voice from two nights ago, rich and musical, deep as a drum. He said half a dozen words—Ned couldn’t understand them—and when he paused, those around him, fifty of them at least, gave a response.

  The man spoke, and then they did. The wind blew. Smoke streamed from torches held and those embedded in the ground.

  The bull, eerily white in the moonlight, stood placidly, as if entranced by the chanting voices. It might be that, Ned thought. Or else they’d given it some drug.

  The voices stopped.

  “I can’t watch,” Kate whispered suddenly, and she turned her face against Ned’s shoulder.

  The man with the axe lifted it so that the weapon, too, glinted under that moon. And then, with a shout of joy, he brought it sweeping, scything, crashing down to strike the bull, overwhelmingly, between the great horns.

  Ned felt Kate crying (only now, for the first time, for the animal). He forced himself to keep watching as the stricken, bludgeoned creature collapsed to its forelegs, and blood—strangely hued in the moon-silver night—burst forth, soaking all those close to it.

  Barbaric, Ned wanted to say, think, feel, but something stopped him.

  The man in the white robe stepped quickly forward holding a bowl to the spurting wound, filling it with blood. With both hands he extended it towards the one with the axe, the man Ned had last seen in the shape of an owl flying from a different ruined tower.

  The big man let fall his bloodied axe. He claimed the bowl with two hands. Ned felt his pulse racing furiously, as if he were sprinting flat out towards some cliff he couldn’t see.

  The man raised the bowl in front of him, the way he’d lifted the axe a moment before. As he spoke, words of incantation, the white bull toppled to one side at his feet like some great structure falling, blood still flowing, soaking into the dusty ground. No one answered the words this time.

  Beside the tree in front of Ned and Kate, a lean, scarred man stood up. He said something under his breath. It might have been a prayer.

  In front of the sanctuary, the raised bowl was lowered by the golden man. He drank the blood.

  “Oh, my!” said Kate Wenger suddenly, too loudly.

  She lifted her head.

  “I can’t . . . I . . . What’s happening?”

  Her voice was really strange. She jerked her hand from Ned’s, shifted away from him.

  Ned stared at her. The man by the tree had heard. He looked back at them. Kate got to her knees, made as if to stand. Terrified, Ned pulled her back down.

  “Kate!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”

  She tried to pull away. “Don’t! I need . . . I have to . . .”

  “No,” he heard the man just ahead of them breathe. “Not this one! She is too young. This should not be—”

  Kate Wenger was writhing and twisting beside Ned, fighting to get away. She kicked him. Breathing in shallow gasps, she scratched his arm, then hit him in the chest with both fists.

  And just then, in that same, precise moment, up on the plateau of Entremont under a full moon in a darkness that belonged only to this time between times when the walls were down, another voice was heard from the entrance to the site, beyond the paired torches burning beside the path.

  “Ned? Ned? Are you here? Come on, I’ve brought the van!”

  With his heart aching, and the first horrified glimmer of understanding coming to him, Ned saw Melanie—small and clever and fearless, with the green streak in her hair—take a hesitant step forward between the smoking torches, the way the bull had.

  In that instant, Kate Wenger went limp beside him.

  She collapsed as if released from a puppet-string, from a force that had been pulling, drawing, demanding her.

  Several things happened at once.

  The scarred man looked at the two of them a last time, then turned back to the ruins. As if he, too, was being pulled that way. And of course he was, Ned later realized: pulled by centuries.

  And by love.

  Ned saw him take a step himself and then another, up the small slope, and there he stopped, still unobserved, watching Melanie. Staring at her. He was completely exposed now, up on the plateau. He would have been spotted if any one of those gathered by the sanctuary had looked his way.

  They didn’t. The big man with the fair hair handed the bowl back to the one in white without even glancing at him. He stood very still, head high, hands empty at his sides, facing Melanie where she stood on the north-south path. They were all watching her, Ned saw.

  She began to come forward, slowly, between fires.

  Ned shifted to his knees so he could see better. He kept one hand on Kate’s shoulder where she lay, face to the dark grass. But his eyes were on Melanie, along with everyone else’s.

  So he saw when she began to stop being Melanie.

  She came along the straight roadway, past the low, ruined walls of ancient houses, towards the sanctuary and the figures waiting there, walking between nine pairs of torches. Ned counted them as she went. Each time she disappeared and reappeared through the smoke, she had changed.

  The first time, Ned actually rubbed his eyes, like a child. After that, he didn’t do it again, he just watched. With his unnaturally keen sight here, he saw when her hair began to change in that moonlight towards red, and then when it was red, and falling so much longer than before. And he thought, for the first time, how inadequate the words for colours could sometimes be.

  Her clothing began to alter. Halfway down the row she was wearing sandals, not boots, and a calf-length, onepiece garment, with a heavy gold belt. He saw her come through another pair of flames with golden bracelets on her arms, and rings on several fingers. She was tall by then.

  He watched her walk between the final torches.

  The man who had summoned her—with the power of Beltaine and the white bull and the bull’s blood—knelt in the roadway. So did all the others, as if they had been waiting for his sign, as if Melanie were a queen, or
a goddess.

  Ned could see, even from where he was, that the big man’s face was alight with joy. And with need, or something beyond need, deeper. Whatever you thought of him, you couldn’t see that look and not respond to it.

  Melanie, who was not Melanie any more, stopped in front of him.

  She was in profile for Ned, lit by the moon and the carried torches. She was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen, or ever imagined seeing.

  He found it difficult to breathe. He saw her look up at the moon for a moment and then back down again, at the man kneeling before her.

  He said something, in that language Ned couldn’t understand. Melanie reached down then, slowly. She touched his yellow hair with the fingers of one hand. It was very bright where they were, as if they were on a stage, acting out motions from long ago, but also here now, in front of him.

  Wherever now was.

  Then the woman spoke for the first time, and Ned heard her say, in exquisite French, formal, very clear, “Change your words. Returned in this new time, shall we not speak in the tongue they use? We will have to, will we not, as the dance begins?”

  “As you wish, my lady.”

  He was still kneeling. He lowered his head. It was difficult to see his face now, with the long hair falling.

  “It is as I wish.”

  Her voice was harder to read, but it sure wasn’t Melanie’s. She looked around slowly. Grave, unsmiling, taking in those nearby, the risen, moon-touched tower.

  “Only one of you?” she said softly.

  “Only one of us,” the kneeling figure said. “Alas.”

  He lifted his face again. Ned saw that he was smiling. He didn’t sound distressed at all.

  “Two of us,” the scarred man said, from the edge of the plateau.

  No more than that, and quietly, but everything altered with the words. Entremont and the night turned. They took on, they accepted, a weight of centuries, their place in a long story.

  Or so it was to seem to Ned, looking back.

  There came a cry of rage from the kneeling man.

  He rose, took a stride this way amid shouts from the others behind him. Ned saw spears lifted, levelled. A sword was drawn by one enormous, bare-chested, nearly naked warrior. The figure in white lifted his hands, still holding the bowl, as if to cast a spell or a curse.

  Amid all this, the man in the grey leather jacket walked forward, entering among them as if he perceived no threat at all, as if he hadn’t even noticed any of this.

  Perhaps he hadn’t, Ned thought. Perhaps he was seeing only the woman. As if nothing else signified or had meaning.

  She had turned to watch him approach, and so Ned could see her face clearly now for the first time. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. His mouth was dry.

  “They tested you?” she said mildly, as the man stopped in front of her. He didn’t kneel. She offered no other greeting.

  He inclined his head in agreement. “They amuse themselves. As children do.” They were speaking French.

  “You think? Not only children, surely. I enjoy being amused,” she said.

  “I recall amusing you.”

  She laughed. Ned closed his eyes again for a second. “Sometimes, yes, my stranger.” She tilted her head to one side, appraisingly. “You look older.”

  “You said that the last time as well.”

  “Did I?” She shrugged.

  She turned away from him to the other one. The bigger man was rigid, tense, like some hunting animal. Ned had a sudden, sharp sense that violence was about to explode here.

  Time to go, he thought.

  “I remember that torc,” the woman said.

  Ned saw the golden-haired man smile. “And I that lapis ring, among the others.”

  She lifted one hand, looked at it briefly. “Did you give me this one?”

  “You know I did. And when I did so.”

  She lowered her hand. “You will tell me what I know?”

  He bowed his head. She laughed.

  Kate was quiet now beside Ned, lying on the grass. He was still on his knees. He felt paralyzed by fear and fascination, by the horror of what had happened. And he couldn’t take his eyes from this woman.

  “We’ve got to get her back!” he whispered, feeling idiotic even as he said it. Who was he, to even think such a thing?

  “Who went up? Who was it?” Kate murmured, finally lifting her head. She wiped at her wet cheeks.

  “That’s Melanie. She came herself. I have no idea why Greg didn’t.”

  “That was going to be me,” Kate said dully. “You know that?”

  Ned nodded. He did know it. It was a difficult thing to get his head around. If Melanie hadn’t come . . .

  He looked away from Kate, up the slope. The man—their man—in his grey jacket was surrounded. He was weaponless. They will give me one, he’d said.

  We should be going right now, Ned thought.

  He stayed where he was.

  “How is it you are here, little stranger?” he heard the golden one demand.

  “Yes, how?” the woman added. “They so dearly wish to know! Look at them! You have spoiled the game.” Music in her voice, capricious, amused.

  “Children offer riddles they think are challenging,” he said mildly.

  Ned could see her face whenever she turned this way.

  “Is that truth? A riddle solved?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “It is a truth, love. But a woman also gave a hint they might be here for the summoning and I heeded her.”

  Love.

  “Ah. A woman? And is she fair? Young, with a sweet voice? You have left me for another. Woe unto my riven heart.”

  There was a little silence. Beside Ned, Kate Wenger had gone still.

  “I will never leave you,” the man said quietly.

  Ned Marriner shivered, on his knees in silver-green grass, hearing that.

  “Never?”

  Her manner had changed again.

  The man’s back was to them, Ned couldn’t see his expression. They heard him say, “Have I not shown as much, by now? Surely?”

  Her turn to be silent.

  “I am a helpless woman,” she said at length. “I must believe you, I suppose.”

  Helpless. Her tone and bearing made a lie of the word. “Tell me,” she said, her manner altering yet again, “is that carving you made of me still down below, in the world?”

  “It is.”

  “And do I look there as I do now?”

  They could see him shake his head.

  “You know you never did, in that stone. And time has worked its will.”

  She took a step back from him, withdrawing. “Ah? Time? And must I accept that? You have not gone to undo that will? Is this love? Am I well served, or do you merely offer words?”

  He lowered his head, as the other man had done.

  “I have not been back in the world for long, my lady. Nor have we arrived in an age when I may enter that cloister to work.”

  Her voice was scornful. “He offers an explanation! How gracious! Tell me, might a better man have done so?”

  “That’s not fair!” Ned heard Kate hiss sharply, beside him.

  The figure in the grey jacket said only, “Perhaps so, my lady. I know there are better men.”

  Ned saw her smile at that. It was a cruel look, he thought.

  The man added, softly, “But it had occurred to me then, as I worked, that no carving could come near to what you are. I shaped it to be only a hint, from the beginning, knowing it would become more so through the years, wearing away. One needs to have seen you—and perhaps more than that—to understand.”

  More than that. Ned drew a shaky breath.

  The smile changed, and was not cruel any more. She lifted a hand as if to touch his face, but she didn’t.

  She turned to the other one instead. “And you? He says he will never leave me.”

  This one’s voice was deeper, resonant. “My answer is as it was from t
he beginning, even before that night among the village fires. You left us when this began. You began this. It was always your right . . . but until the sky falls I will fight to have you back.”

  Kate sat up beside Ned in the grass.

  The tall woman, red and gold as a fairy queen, said, “Indeed? Will you fight for me?”

  He said, “I would prove my love in the stranger’s blood tonight and always, with joy.”

  “And prove your worth?”

  His teeth flashed suddenly; he pushed back his yellow hair, which was being blown across his eyes. He was magnificent, like a horse. Or a stag, Ned thought suddenly, remembering the horns.

  “Have I ever been unworthy, Ysabel?”

  They heard her laughter ripple across the ruins.

  Ysabel.

  “Ah,” she said. “So that is my name this time?”

  “The animal offered it, before it died. The druid said as much.”

  “Then I accept, of course.”

  Her amusement was gone. Another shift of mood, like a cloud across the moon.

  She turned her head, looking down at the white bull lying in its own blood on the dusty, silvered street. She said something too softly for Ned to hear. Then she looked up again, from one man to the other.

  “And now what happens? I name you both, is that it? And then a battle? That is why we are alive again?”

  A challenge in her now, almost anger.

  “That’s why he couldn’t answer before,” Kate whispered. “About his name.”

  This time Ned reached out and took her hand. It lay quietly in his. They watched together. It was necessary to leave, he knew, and impossible.

  The woman had turned this way again, towards the smaller man. The moonlight was on her face.

  “What shall I call you?” she asked.

  Her voice had lost that softer nuance again. She was controlling him, all of them. Wilful, teasing.

  “Shall I name you Becan because you are small? Or Morven, one more time, since you came from the sea?”

  “I had a different name when I did that,” he said mildly.

  “I remember.”

  “When I first came.”

  “I remember.”

  “And I . . . I have been . . . you have called me Anwyll.”

  She lifted her head. “Beloved? Do you presume so much? That I must name you thus, because I foolishly did so once?”