Ysabel Read online

  He thought he knew what the two men and Ysabel would say. But he also remembered his mother and aunt on the path from the tower last night, and it occurred to him that they might think of twenty-five years as heartbreakingly long.

  He didn’t have answers. He amped up his music a little more and he ran, zigzagging up the mountain as the day waned towards an ending.

  AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of laboured, driving work, back and forth along the terraced slope, twisting his way through the last of the day’s descending climbers, he smashed, hard, into the inner screening wall he’d been warned about.

  Too soon! he thought, but even as the thought came his legs gave out and Ned felt himself falling. He didn’t slide, this was still more a steep hike than a climb, but he lay in the middle of the narrow switchback, exhausted, drained, and it felt for a long moment like he wasn’t going to be able to get up.

  And that wouldn’t do. With an effort he pulled his earbuds out and rolled to one elbow. His small running pack felt massive, a burden on his back. He worked to shrug himself out of it. There was a taste of dust in his mouth. Better than blood, he thought.

  Then, with apprehension coiling tightly within him, he released the screen, because there was nothing else he could do.

  He cried out. Couldn’t help it.

  The immediate pain in his head was brutal: a vise, not knitting needles or a hammer. He’d been right, not that it did him any good now—the screening had been keeping at bay the full impact of where he was.

  Eyes tightly closed, gasping for thin, shallow breaths, aware that there were tears on his face, Ned realized he was going to have to phone down after all. He wasn’t even sure he could stay conscious till someone got here to him.

  He opened his eyes, forced himself to look up from where he lay. And facing east, he saw the chapel below the summit’s great cross. It wasn’t even far; he’d gotten pretty damned close. They’d have to give him credit for that, wouldn’t they?

  There was nobody else up here. No one had heard his cry. Every sane person had passed him already, going down the long slope towards drinks and a shower, sunset and dinner, out of the wind that was blowing here.

  Ned felt something else then: a pulse like a probe in his head. He made himself, moving very slowly, sit up. Everything took so much appalling effort, hurt so much. He looked within himself. Cadell’s aura was still there. And the pulse, the signal, was coming from him.

  Of course, Ned thought. You’re clueless, Marriner. A loon.

  He’d been thinking of Cadell as chasing him, but he’d been screened. The Celt hadn’t been able to see Ned any more than Ned had spotted him down there. Cadell was just powering his way towards the summit, not knowing if Ned was ahead or behind, or anywhere at all.

  Now, though, he realized it, and he was making sure Ned knew he was coming.

  I should be afraid, Ned thought. He actually felt too weak for fear, as if all he wanted to do, all he could do, was sit here among dust and stones and scrubby little bushes and let the sun go down on these slopes, and on him.

  Well, he could make a phone call first. Someone would come. His aunt was in the call-back. His dad was on auto-dial, and so was Greg. Well, not really, in fact. Melanie had done that very funny nine- or ten-digit auto-dial for Greg on Ned’s phone. Then Ned had rigged their phones with ringtones in the middle of the night.

  He could almost smile, remembering when he’d called her the next morning at the cathedral. “You will be made to suffer!” Melanie had said, but she’d been laughing.

  If they were understanding anything about this properly, she was somehow up above him right now, not that far.

  He thought about her laughing that morning, and something in him altered with the memory. Anger, Ned thought, could drive you hard. It could ruin you or make you, like any other really strong feeling, he guessed.

  Right now, it pulled him to his feet.

  He realized, straightening carefully, that he could handle this pain too. It had been the contrast, the shock of it when the screen went down, that had flattened him. But he was really high now, far above the plain where the battle had been, and he could hold it together for a bit longer. The weakness in his legs was something else, one more thing. Like he really, really needed more. He could almost hear his friend Larry saying that, the guys laughing.

  Cadell was coming, and he was aware now that Ned was ahead of him.

  With an effort that cost him, Ned shouldered his pack again. Since when were these things so heavy? His legs felt rubbery, the way they could near the end of a cross-country race. But he’d done those races for three years now, he knew this feeling. It was new, and it wasn’t. You could build on what you had experienced, and he’d smashed into walls running before.

  That’s what it was all about, the track coach had always told them. You find where your wall is, and you train to push it back, but when you hit it . . . you go through. If you can do that, you’re a runner. Ned could hear that voice, too, in his mind.

  Ned went through. He was almost comically slow. Walking, not running. In places here—he was right below the chapel now—there were loose rocks on the path that could send you tumbling.

  He looked back. And this time he saw someone coming, already on the switchback section, steady and strong and fast.

  Ned felt like crying, which was really not going to help. He looked ahead. There were two zigzags left, or he could climb. He wasn’t sure he had the strength for that, but he was pretty certain he didn’t have the time not to. He clenched his jaw—an expression one or two people would have recognized—and left the path. He bent to the slanting rock face, using his hands now.

  It wasn’t alpine climbing or anything like that. Any normal time, any normal condition, he could have propelled himself up this slope easily. He could have raced guys up here.

  Now, two or three times he was sure he was going to fall. His hands were sweaty, and there was sweat in his eyes. He took off the sunglasses, they were sliding down his nose. The light wasn’t as strong now, the sun low, striking the mountain, washing it in late-day colours. He still saw too much red, but not as badly as before, this high up.

  Really high, in fact. He pushed himself, feet and hands, digging and pulling, gasping with the effort it cost him. His T-shirt was plastered to his body. His head hurt; it was pulsing. His legs felt as if he were wearing weights. Was this, he thought, what getting old was like? When your body wouldn’t do things you knew it had been able to do? Another essay topic?

  Idiot thought. “You’re a loon!” he said aloud, and made himself laugh: the sound sudden and startling in that lonely, windy place. He took strength from it. Anger wasn’t the only thing you could use.

  And, falling apart or not, he was up. He pushed with his right foot at a rock. It slipped away, tumbling down the slope, but his hands were on the top now and he scrambled to the last plateau.

  He was directly in front of the chapel. He bent over, catching his breath, trying to control his trembling. He was so weak. There was a courtyard, he saw through an arched opening: a well, a low stone wall on the far side overlooking the southern slopes. The sea would be beyond, some distance off, but not all that far.

  He glanced back again. Cadell was clearly visible, golden-haired, cutting straight up across all the switchbacks, hand over hand through scrub and bush, disdaining the path. He wouldn’t need paths, Ned thought. He wanted to hate this man—and the other one—and knew he was never going to be able to do that.

  He could beat them, though.

  It was easier here, on the level ground just below the last steep ridge to the summit and cross. He didn’t have to go up there. If Veracook was right—and it occurred to him that if she wasn’t he had done all this to no purpose at all—he had to head east, not up.

  He looked ahead and saw, as she’d said he would, the mountain falling away to the south in a swooping sheet of stone just beyond the cross. The view was spectacular in the light of the westering sun, fast clouds ov
erhead in the wind.

  But that wasn’t his route. The garagai was farther along, she’d said. Up one more slope, the one right in front of him, and then down and right along the next rock face.

  He looked back one more time. Cadell was moving ridiculously fast. He saw the man lift his head and shout something. He couldn’t hear; the wind was too strong. It could blow you off the mountain, Ned thought, if you were, like, a little kid, or careless.

  He dropped his pack against the stone wall of the chapel and pushed himself into a run. A shambling, dragging motion, an embarrassment, a joke, and he couldn’t even keep it going. The slope of this ridge was upwards again, and he was too drained, too spent. The wind from the north, on his left, kept pushing him towards the long slide south. He did slip once, banging his knee. He thought he heard a shout behind him. He didn’t look back.

  Fighting for breath, fighting his body, he scrambled up the last ridge. He had to go right here, south and down. He looked that way. Steep, he’d need to be careful. He saw nothing, but Vera had said you couldn’t, that the cave was hidden until you were right on it. The green land far below was the battlefield, he knew. The plain below the mountain. All those dead, all those years ago. The man behind him had been there.

  And the woman ahead, if she really was here.

  Ned started down. Too fast, he slipped and skidded almost immediately. He steadied himself, but was still moving too quickly. He stumbled again, leaning way backwards so as not to tumble and roll on the face of the mountain. He banged an elbow and swore as he scrabbled on the seat of his pants, dislodging pebbles. He grabbed for a rock, felt his palm tear and scrape, but he stopped himself.

  He saw the cave, right beside him.

  The gemstone of his aunt’s bracelet was bright on his wrist. He didn’t know what that was about, when it had started. He didn’t have time to think about it. He shifted along the rock face and saw that there was a last descent—a short one—into the cave. There was light coming through it from another side, south. Vera had said there were two openings.

  And that the chasm was below it, through the other entrance.

  He was here.

  Ned went in, turning his face to the rocks, going hand and foot again. He slid the last bit, touched bottom, turned and looked around. He was still trembling, his legs mostly. His mouth was dry. He’d left the water bottle with his pack.

  He was in a darkened space, not too large, sheltered from the wind, level underfoot. A rock roof disappeared into shadow above. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but he didn’t see anything.

  He turned to look south and his jaw dropped at the wonder of it, the quiet beauty spread out through that wider opening, as if it were a window onto glory. The fields below, a glinting line of river, the land rising a very little, and falling, and then rising again across the river towards mountains in the distance, shining in the late, clear light, and then the far blue of the sea.

  He walked over and looked down. Another drop, a trickier one, because the shelf below was steep, more a slope than a plateau, really. He’d been warned it was dangerous. I’m not going to fall off a mountain, he’d told his father.

  He could fall off down there, easily. But on that slanting shelf, to his right, Ned saw a cluster of dark green bushes against the sheer rock face. They framed an emptiness, a black, a hole in the world. The chasm was here. He had arrived. For what it was worth.

  He was very much afraid. He took a breath. Lifted his dirty hands and spat on them the way athletes did. There was blood on one of them, from grabbing at stone as he slid. He wiped it on his sweats.

  “Here goes nuthin’,” he said. Little kids said things like that. He was trying to be funny, for himself.

  “You do not have to go down,” he heard, behind him. “I am here.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  She came from the back of the cave, from shadow and dream to where the light slanted through the wide window of that southern opening, reaching her.

  Ned hadn’t thought he’d ever see her again. Her presence became a different kind of blow to the heart. He wanted to kneel, explain, apologize. He didn’t know what to do. He was here, he had done it, and he was empty of thought, or any sense of how to act.

  She walked towards him, the auburn hair bright as the late-day sunlight touched her. She was as tall as he was.

  She stopped, regarding him, and smiled, not unkindly.

  “It is difficult to stay down there,” she said. “There is too much wind. It feels as if the mountain wants to throw you off . . . or send you into the chasm.”

  He nodded jerkily. He couldn’t speak. The sound of her voice undid him, left him feeling bereft with the thought that he might be hearing it now and never again.

  He thought of the sculpture in the cloister. Phelan’s offering, showing her as half gone from the beginning, even before time began its work. Eluding as she emerged. He understood it now. You saw Ysabel as you stood before her, heard that voice, and you felt loss in the moment because you feared she might leave you.

  Because you knew she would.

  She was gazing steadily at him, appraising, more curious than anything else. Her eyes were blue, or green. It was difficult to tell, there were shadows behind her and above. There was no malice, no anger here, though he couldn’t see warmth, either. But why should he have expected that? What could he possibly have expected?

  “How are you here?” she said.

  That, at least, he should have been ready for. But it was difficult to form thoughts that made sense. Stammering, he said, “You . . . you said sacrifice. At Entremont. Not just killing.”

  Amusement, the eyebrows arched. She was barefoot on the cold stone, he saw. Wearing a long, white cotton skirt and a blue blouse over it. Her hair was down, along her back, framing her face.

  “I did,” she agreed, still studying him. “You were there?”

  He nodded.

  “Unwise. You might have died, had they known it.”

  He nodded. Phelan had known it. He didn’t say that.

  “There are many places of sacrifice,” she said.

  They’d figured that out, too. He said, “My mother got the sacrifice part, when we told her. And . . . a boar gave me a clue.”

  He didn’t tell about Melanie, the story she’d told him of the battle below. The sacrifice of the chieftains here. He was going to need to speak of Melanie, he had no idea how.

  Her expression changed. “Your mother gave you that?” She was pointing at the bracelet. The stone was bright.

  He shook his head. “My aunt. Her sister.” He hesitated. It wasn’t his, but, “Would you like it?”

  She smiled, pleased, but shook her head, looking at him.

  A long, still moment, quiet in the cave, the wind blowing outside, the sun going down. The living world so far from where they were.

  Then Ysabel smiled again, but differently.

  “Now I see,” she said, and the tone had altered as well, changes in her voice and face, like ripples in water. Ned wasn’t sure—he wasn’t sure of anything—but he thought he heard sadness, and maybe something else.

  “What is there to see?”

  She didn’t answer. She turned away—he felt it as a wound—then she lifted a hand, stilling him.

  He heard it too, and was looking towards the entrance through which he’d come himself when Cadell jumped down and in.

  He landed, noted Ned’s presence. Then he turned to Ysabel.

  He didn’t speak, and the woman said nothing either, absorbing, accepting what was inescapable in his face. There was nothing hidden in him, nothing held back. Watching the two of them Ned felt like the intruder he was: excluded, inappropriate, trivial. If he was right, if he understood this at all, Cadell had died more than two thousand years ago, in the chasm below this cave.

  “You have a wound,” she said, speaking first.

  “A knife. It is inconsequential.”

  “Indeed. What would be of consequence?”
r />   Ned remembered that ironic tone from Beltaine, after the fires and the bull. He realized his hands were shaking again.

  Cadell’s deep voice carried a note that could only be called joy. He said, “Coming here to find the Roman before me. That would shatter this heart as much as would the sky falling at the end of days.”

  “Ah,” she said, “the poet returns?”

  “He never left you. You know that, love.”

  “I know very little,” she said, in that voice that made a lie of the words.

  “You know that I am here, and before your three nights have turned. I remember this place.”

  “But of course you do,” said another voice, from behind Ned and below.

  They all wheeled. But even as he did, Ned saw Ysabel’s face, and he realized she was unsurprised.

  They watched as Phelan pulled himself up from the slanting plateau below the opening to the south.

  He stood, unhurried, brushing dust from his knees and the torn jacket, using his right hand only. Then he, in turn, looked at the woman.

  “A wound?” said Ysabel.

  “Inconsequential.” Ned saw the bald head, the scar, the grey, cool eyes and then—with surprise—a smile.

  “You heard that?” She was smiling, too.

  “It is my proof of being present, love. I need to have heard that or you might not believe me.”

  “You would lie to me?”

  He shook his head. “Never in any life. But you have disbelieved before.”

  “With cause?”

  Phelan looked at her. Then shook his head again. “With a right to do so, but not with cause.”

  The brief smile had gone. There was hunger in his face, and longing, so fierce they were a kind of light.

  “You were below,” said Cadell flatly.

  “A harder climb, yes, but I was south and had to come that way.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You were not here.”

  Phelan shrugged. “No? Tell me, what did she ask the boy, about his bracelet?”

  Ned felt the weight of three gazes upon him. He wanted to be invisible, absent, gone.