Where had that come from? He
didn't know a word of Welsh, apart from
sice
itself and
da iawn.
Weird, weird, weird.
Berry placed the chisel under
the lip of the tomb, avoiding the eyes of the knight because this was just some
old stone box, OK? Dai handed him the mallet and he struck the head of the
chisel.
Thud-ud-ud.
Felt something crumble, give
way.
He stopped. "Where's Bethan?"
"Outside, with Idwal, I
should think. She didn't want to come in, either. Morelli . . . ?"
"Yeah?"
"This thing with Bethan
and you. Nothing serious there?"
"What's that mean?"
"You know what it means,
man, you know the way it has been for her"
"Yeah." Berry hit the
chisel again. They heard fragments of loose stone fall a few inches inside the
tomb. A flat kind of chink as a piece struck something and did not bounce off,
rather the substance it had fallen on simply crumbled.
Dust to dust.
The torchlight flickered.
"She's not for you, boy."
"You don't think so, huh?"
Berry left the chisel jammed under the lid of the tomb. Dai fitted the end of
one of the crowbars into what was now a half-inch gap alongside it.
The torchlight flickered.
Berry's eyes met the smooth,
years-worn orbs of the knight's eyes.
They were open now. He knew
those eyes were open.
"I think maybe we aren't gonna
need the jack after all," Berry said.
Bethan said. "I've come to talk about trees."
Miss Rhys, the judge's granddaughter,
was bolt upright in the judge's high-backed Gothic chair, her face made harsh by
candlelight which ought to have softened it. Bethan stood on the old rug, where
the dead Giles had lain, both feet on the dragon's head.
Claire said, '"My tree or
yours?"
"You found your tree,"
Bethan said. "I want to find mine."
"Why?"
"I want to chop it
down," Bethan said simply.
Claire Rhys looked at her with
contempt.
"Well?" Bethan did not move.
"Have you asked Buddug?"
"If I had been five days
in the desert, I wouldn't ask Buddug for a cup of water."
"Go away," Claire
said. "Go and ask Buddug."
Bethan moved towards the desk,
intending to knock a candlestick over in her face.
"Come any closer."
Claire said calmly, "and I shall have to harm you."
Bethan stopped. The room had
grown very cold, she thought, under the influence of its mistress's
displeasure.
She said, "What have you
become?"
Claire smiled. ""You
never really met my grandfather, did you?"
Bethan said nothing.
"I've discovered, to my shame,
that he was rather a weak man. He knew he had to return here, that he could not
break the chain. So he left my grandmother and my mother in England and he came
back. He came back alone."
Bethan was momentarily puzzled.
Then she felt nearly ill.
"He ought, of course, to
have brought them with him."
The village, Aled had said,
demanded sacrifices.
"But he was weak, as I say.
He left them and he returned alone."
.
. . the old Druids, see, they
did not sacrifice each other, their . . . you know, virgins, kids. None of that
nonsense. But I've heard it said they used to sacrifice their enemies.
"You brought Giles as your
little sacrifice," Bethan said, her voice like dust.
"And also atoned for Thomas
Rhys," Claire said. "Don't forget that. I had to complete what he
could not."
She meant her parents. She'd
given her parents in sacrifice to Y Groes and to whatever lay in the tomb and whatever
it represented.
He
was only English
, Sali Dafis had said.
"You were very
stupid," Claire said. "You and your child could have belonged here.
You could have lived in the warmth, at the heart of our heritage and watched it
spread and grow and flourish like a lovely garden."
"Once the weeds had been
killed," Bethan said.
"Your words."
"And Glyndwr will rise
again, like the legends say, springing from his tomb with his army behind him
to free Wales from the oppressor."
Miss Rhys spread her hands.
"We are not naive. Glyndwr is dead and buried."
And then her voice rose,
horribly close to Buddug-pitch.
"But the Bird is aloft. And
Death walks the roads in his long coat. And the shit-breathed hag—
Gwrach y rhybin
—the hag is on the wing
again."
Bethan turned away, almost
choking.
They had both crowbars wedged under the lip of the tomb, the effigy on
top slightly askew now.
The torch flickered.
Dai stood back. "I think
we are there."
"How you figure we should
play it? Slide it?"
"If we both get this end,"
Dai said, "we can lift it and then swing it to one side. Are you prepared
then, Morelli?"
"For?"
"For whatever is . . .
there. Spent most of my life with stiffs, see," Dai said. "You were a
bit jumpy back at the depot, if I remember rightly "
"These are old bones. Old
bones aren't the same."
Dai smiled, the torchlight
glancing off his bald skull.
And you reckon it's old Owain Glyndwr
in here? Well, tell me, Morelli, how will you know?"
"Be more obvious if it
isn't."
"You mean if it's
empty."
"Is what I mean."
Berry stood at the head of the tomb, hands grasping the stone lip an inch or so
from the eroded cheeks of the knight. "OK, Dai? We gonna count down from
five and then lift and swing? Four, three, two, one—"
The torch went out.
Berry heard the grating thump
of falling masonry. An icy, numbing pain bolted up his arm.
When the torch came on again,
Dai was holding it. Berry looked down and couldn't see The end of his own left
hand beyond the lip of the tomb, beyond the smirk of ages on the
face of the knight. He was in agony, knew his wrist was broken, maybe his arm
too. And, worse than that, he was trapped.
Dai was walking off into the
nave. "I'm sorry, Morelli," he said over his shoulder. "But a
man has to make sacrifices if he wants to retire to paradise."
It was all shatteringly clear to Bethan now.
"And Dilwyn's wife? A harmless
little typist from the South-East?"
Miss Rhys stood up. "We've
spoken enough, Bethan. Time you left, I think."
"It doesn't bear thinking about.
How can you live with it?
"In comparison to what the
English have done to the Welsh over the centuries, it's really rather a small
thing, wouldn't you say? I should have thought that you, as a teacher—"
"But I don't have to live
with it," Bethan said. "I can tell whoever I choose. Beginning with
the police."
"Bethan, I used to be in
journalism," Claire said wearily. I learned a lot about the police and the
law. What it amounts to in this case is that the police don't believe in magic
and, even if they did, no offences have been committed under the
English
legal system. Now go away and
dwell upon your future."
When she calmly blew out both
red candles, Bethan's nerve went; she scrabbled for the door handle and got
out, feeling her way along the walls, through the hall, into the living room
where the moon glanced off shiny things, and out into the blood-washed night.
She had to find Berry, get him
away from that church, if Dai and Idwal had not persuaded him already to forget
the fantasy of dislodging a tradition cemented through centuries.
She came out of the gateway,
between the sycamores, looked up and down the country lane over the sweating snow.
The Sprite was still parked where she'd left it. She looked in the back and saw
that the hydraulic jack and crowbars were missing. Berry had gone to desecrate
the tomb.
Trembling with anxiety, Bethan
ran through the lych-gate into the circular graveyard where the atmosphere was
close and clinging and the sky was low, red and juicy. She could see across the
village—still no power down there, houses lit by glow-worms—to the Nearly
Mountains, hard and bright with ice.
Bethan stopped and stiffened as
a hand clawed her shoulder, spun her around.
Buddug seemed to tower over
her, bulky in a dark duffel-coat, her big face as red as the sky.
"A question you have for
me, is it, little bitch?"
Chapter LXXIII
They would come for him in time, he knew that.
It was not dark. The light from
the sky leaked in from the long window, crimson.
He was too weary now to endure
the pain of struggle, wanting to lay his head down on the tomb in exhaustion.
But the only part of the tomb his head could reach was the head of the effigy,
his eyes looking into its eyes, its lips . . . He turned away in revulsion and
the movement dragged on his trapped arm and the pain made his whole body blaze.
He'd looked and felt around for
something to wedge under the slab, next to his arm. Something he could lean on,
hard enough perhaps to make some space to pull the arm
out.
But Dai had taken away the jack
and both crowbars and then Robin's flying jacket which Berry had hung over the
rood screen while they worked on the tomb.
"Scumbag!" he
screamed, and the walls threw it back at him with scorn. ". . . bag, ag,
ag."
The stone knight shifted,
settled on Berry's arm; he thought he could hear his bones splintering, getting
ground into powder. From the other side of the church wall, he heard the
movement in the snow which he'd earlier assumed was Idwal Pugh.
"Idwal! Help me,
willya!"
The cry was out before he could
stop it.
No way could it be Idwal out
there. No way could it have been Idwal first time around, when he and Dai were
busy with the crowbars. Idwal had been dismissed or was dead or
was a party to the betrayal.
Which was not a betrayal of him
so much as of Bethan.
Was there anybody left in these
parts who had not at some time betrayed Bethan?
He wept for Bethan and because
of the pain, because he was trapped. Because, sooner or later, they were going
to come for him.
Bethan looked up into the split veins and the venom. Black eyes and
yellow, twisted teeth.
"
Gwrach"
Bethan spat.
Buddug did not move at first,
but something leapt behind her black pebble eyes. And then her enormous turkey killer's
hands came up with incredible speed and lifted Bethan off her feet and hurled
her into the church wall.
Bethan's head cracked against
the stone and bounced off and Buddug whirled and brutally slapped her, with
bewildering force, across the face so that her head spun away so
hard and so fast she thought her neck was breaking.