He tried to clear his mind of
all such thoughts and made himself go through the motions of checking out the
structure of the tomb, as Ingley must have done.
Before he died.
For Chrissake . . .
The body of the tomb was
constructed out of stone blocks, each about ten inches by six, three rows of
them supporting the top slab and the effigy.
He laid the torch down on the
knight's stone-armoured breast, up against the praying hands with their chipped
knuckles.
Then he turned his back on the
tomb, fitted his fingers under the edge of the slab, closed his eyes, counted
down from three . . . and heaved.
To his secret horror, the slab
moved just enough to show him that with the equipment and perhaps a little help
he could get inside.
The thought chilled his
stomach.
OK. Calm down.
He knew he had to go fetch the
stuff from the car, and whatever was in there he had to let out. And let some
air into this place.
An act of desecration.
Sure. No problem.
Berry emerged from the chapel
of the tomb holding the rubber flashlight confidently in front of him. The
flashlight immediately went out.
He froze.
And the sour milk air clotted
around him and clogged his head. He felt dizzy and sat down on some pew on the
edge of the nave, and then found he could not move. His thoughts congealed; his
senses seemed to be setting like concrete.
Then, after a while—could have been hours, minutes or only seconds—there
were ribbons of light.
And the light came now not from
the windows on either side or the long window behind the altar, but from above.
It descended in a cold white ray, making dust-motes scintillate
in the air, and he had the idea it must be the moon and the pillars and
buttresses of stone were like trees on either side and the air was pungent now
with brackish scents and the residue of woodsmoke.
As the walls of the nave closed
in, he looked up into the light sky and on the boundary of his vision a black
figure eased out of the mist.
Chapter LXIX
Bethan parked the Sprite in the shadow of the lych gate and sat there
for a minute or two, making her mind up.
Then she got out, slammed the
door—you had to slam it or it would not stay shut—and walked back down the lane
to the
Tafarn.
What she was remembering was
Martin Coulson, the curate, who had fallen and smashed his head on the tomb of Sir
Robert Meredydd. And this had happened in broad
daylight.
The image came to her of Berry
Morelli face-down on the stone-flagged floor, unmoving, a river of dark blood
flowing down the aisle. She began to run.
By the time she reached the
door of the pub, the perspiration was out around her eyes; she felt clammy, wanting
to shed her hat and her raincoat.
But she remembered how Owain
Glyndwr, it was said, could bring about rapid changes in the weather to
confound his enemies. Even Shakespeare's satire seemed to reflect this. Bethan,
having studied Henry IV at college, knew all Glendower's overblown speeches,
heard them echoing as she ran.
Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
Against my power; thrice from
the banks of Wye
And sandy-bottomed Severn have I
sent him
Bootless home and weather-beaten
back.
So Bethan took off nothing.
From the
Tafarn
's ill-lit interior came sounds of merriment. Guto's voice,
and the rest were English accents.
Inside the doorway she almost
bumped into a stooping figure emerging from the gents' lavatory.
"Bethan! Where the hell
have you been? You look all of a tizz."
"Oh. Dai." It came
out as a long sigh.
"You look as if you need a
drink, girl. Come and—"
"No. no. no." Bethan
wiped sweat from her eyes, smearing what remained of her make-up. "You
must help me, Dai. First, you have to get all those people out of there,"
"Oh hell." Dai Death
looked exasperated. "This is what Aled was saying before he stopped
talking altogether.
Everybody's gone mad tonight. Anyway,
they won't go. The road is blocked at the Pont end and God knows what it's like
over the Nearly Mountains. The council's out with the snow-ploughs and they're
waiting for some clearance from—"
"Dai, get them out. I do
not care how. Tell Guto—"
"They're all bloody
pissed, girl! They don't care whether they get home or not."
"God," Bethan was
almost frantic. "Then can you and Idwal get up to the church and help
Berry?"
"Why, what's he
doing?"
Bethan wiped her eyes again and
clasped her hands in front of her, squeezing the fingers. And told him very
slowly and very precisely that Berry Morelli was trying to break
into a tomb which was believed to contain the mortal remains of Owain Glyndwr.
Dai looked sorrowful. She did
not think he believed what she had said, only that she was insane.
"My job, Bethan" he
said, "is to put them in, not get them out."
"I wish this was all a
joke, Dai. I really wish it was a joke."
Dai put a calming hand on her
shoulder. "All right. All right. I will go. I'll bring Idwal. A good
chapel boy. We'll both go. All right?"
Bethan nodded, sagging in the
doorway. The heat was awful.
Aled washed glasses and watched the English drink.
The General Secretary of Plaid
Cymru appeared at the bar. "Did they say when the ploughs would be
through?"
Aled shook his head.
"Where's Emlyn gone. The
driver? He said he was going to see some friends, but he hasn't come back. We
need a good driver now, more than ever, for these chaps."
Aled shook his head, rinsed a
glass, held it up in the candlelight, stood it on a shelf behind him.
"Any use, do you think, if
I talk to the police?"
Aled made no reply. His hands
moved mechanically, rinsing the glasses, holding them to the weak light,
putting each one carefully on the shelf.
"I can't understand it.
Why is the weather so bad in Pontmeurig when here it's so incredibly mild? I've
never known anything like this . . . Oh. sorry, am I in your way?"
Charlie Firth had appeared
unsteadily at his shoulder holding the plate which had held the cold meat pie
he'd shared with Ray Wheeler. The plate slithered from his fingers onto the
slop-mat on the bartop.
"I feel sick,"
Charlie said.
He said it loudly enough to
turn heads. Ray Wheeler's head anyway. And Guto's. Miranda's head was still on
Guto's shoulder, shifting occasionally in sleep.
"The way I see it,"
Charlie said, "it was either that Welsh whisky or the meat pie. I'm
betting on the pie."
Aled washed another glass,
rinsed it, held it to the candle.
"You listening to me,
Alec?"
Aled turned his back on Charlie
Firth and put the glass on the shelf behind him.
"
You
tried to poison me once. I said it'd never happen again."
"What are you talking
about?" Alun said.
"You tried to poison
me," Charlie Firth said, stabbing Alun in the chest with a rigid
forefinger. "You're Welsh, aren't you?"
"And you, I'm afraid, are
legless, my friend," Alun said jovially. "Go and sit down. We'll get
you back soon, don't worry."
"Come on mate," Ray
Wheeler said. "I had half that pie, and I don't feel sick."
Aled washed another glass,
impassive.
Charlie reached across the bar,
snatched it from his hand and hurled it at the nearest wall. Nobody saw it
connect; the light was too weak.
Aled said nothing but walked
out through the door to the kitchen.
"That's it then."
Guto hauled Miranda to her feet in the manner of a man well used to removing
comatose companions from bars. "This looks like another of those scenes I need
to avoid."
"Don't know what's come
over him." Bill Sykes said. He'd removed his overcoat and his jacket, was
sitting in shirt sleeves and a paisley waistcoat. Nobody had commented on the
disappearance of Shirley Gillies and young Gary.
"The Welsh," Charlie
Firth's face was swollen with contempt, as if he were accumulating a mouthful
of spit.
Behind him, Guto eased Miranda into the
doorway, half-dragging her; she was dead weight. He motioned with his head to
Alun, who mouthed. "We can't leave them here."
"We bloody can," Guto
shouted.
"Where have you gone,
Alec, you little Welsh twat?" Charlie Firth was roaring.
Alun dodged behind him to the
door, shouting to Ray and Bill. "We'll find Emlyn for you. The driver.
Send him back."
Outside, he found Guto on the
bench to the left of the porch, with Miranda in his arms. "Come on, come
on," Guto was whispering urgently.
"Yes, yes, I'm here,"
Alun said, searching his pockets for the Land-Rover keys. And then he realised
Guto was talking to Miranda, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, blue
snowlight washing over her classically English autocratic face.
Guto stared up at him, panic in
his eyes. "Alun, I—I can't bloody wake her, can I?"
Chapter LXX
The white moon, sickle-sharp, overhung the glade. The fat trees
crouched, entangling their aged, twisted branches like the antlers of stags.
Groundmist was waist-high and
looked as thick as candle-grease. The trees were in a silent semi-circle within
the mist. He tried to count them and could not.
Not because there were too many
of them, but because his brain was working too slowly for counting, like a
clockwork mechanism winding down. Also the trees were somehow
indistinct, embedded in the groundmist. They were one. An old entity. A fusion
of consciousness, of now and of then.
More than trees. They had
strong, vibrant thoughts and the thoughts had sounds which came from far way,
as if windborne. One was as high as a flute or a lamb's bleat. Another sombre
and quivering like the lower octaves of a harmonium. They could have been male
or female. And they were orchestrated together, one voice, which could have
been speaking in no other language but Welsh.
The mist cleared a little, although
it did not evaporate as much as soak into the ground, leaving solid patches
like mould, like fungus.
Around an altar.
Which was not an altar of stone,
as artists imagine, but of wood, the trunk of an immensely thick oak tree,
split in half as if by lightning, hewn out down its centre to form a shallow
cradle, almost a coffin.
sice
, he heard.
Wind in the trees, air-brakes
of an articulated-lorry, bellows, a freezer door opening and closing.
siiiiiiiiiiiice.
There formed in the hollow of
the altar, in the cradle, in the coffin, a satin-white woman with flowing red
hair through which tendrils of mist drifted and curled.
The trees encircled her, their
knobbled branches bowed. Stood there in the moonlight—so much light from such a
slender moon—and watched her dying like an October butterfly.