Alys Clare - Out of the Dawn Light

When eventually Sibert spoke, it made me jump.

‘The hall used to be there.’ He pointed.

I waited. When he did not elaborate, I prompted him. ‘And the treasure was kept in the hall?’

‘No, oh, no, it can’t have been.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘Our halls were always built for communal living and nobody in their right mind would hide a valuable object where there were constant comings and goings. The hiding place must surely have been in some secret location, Lassair. I did not even know there was need of such a hiding place until Romain told me about the — about the treasure. I’d never even heard of any treasure. I imagine that nobody was meant to know about it and no doubt the penalty for speaking of it was severe.’ He frowned, as if by keeping something so important so very secret his people had somehow let him down.

‘Did you really know nothing at all of this until Romain sought you out?’ I asked, although I felt that I already knew. If Sibert had discovered that there was a hidden treasure, undoubtedly he would have gone to hunt for it alone. Although there were those mysterious trips he admitted to have made to spy on his ancestral home. .

He smiled bleakly. ‘No, not really.’ He glanced at me briefly and, as if he read my mind, added, ‘It wasn’t why I kept coming here. I had heard whispers,’ he went on, ‘but the little I overheard made no sense. I’m not supposed to know anything at all. Hrype would kill me if he found out.’

‘I won’t tell him,’ I said fervently. I spat on my finger and drew it dramatically across my throat. ‘On my life.’

I don’t think he heard. He was far away, lost in memory. ‘I’ve always spied on Hrype,’ he said dreamily. ‘You would too, if you had to live with him. He’s just — weird, and he’s so secretive all the time that sometimes I- Well, once I woke in the night and he was in some sort of a trance. He was sitting cross-legged by the hearth, where a small fire burned. There was something smouldering on top of one of the logs and it gave off a really pungent smell. It gave me a headache, and I started to feel dizzy. Anyway, Hrype had his eyes almost closed, just slits showing between the lids, and he was muttering. Sort of chanting. I kept back in the shadows and tried to make out what he was saying and I realized with a shock that he was talking about Drakelow. Of course, I had to go on listening then because although I didn’t know a lot about it, I knew where and what it was and what it meant to my family.’

‘And he was speaking about the treasure?’ I butted in. I couldn’t help myself.

‘He must have been, although I didn’t realize it at the time. He was chanting to it, I think, as if the object was there before him and he was communicating with it. Sensing its power, perhaps.’ He shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t know, I don’t have Hrype’s knowledge or his gifts. But he spoke of something he referred to as the sea sanctuary. He talked to the thing, telling it that it was safe there in this sanctuary place because its location was a secret and quite soon it would be hidden for ever, and — oh! ’

His gasp of realization came an instant after mine.

Sibert turned to me, wide eyed with awe. ‘He knew!’ he whispered. ‘He predicted this landfall!’

‘He did,’ I agreed. I was struck by a further thought. ‘Sibert, they must have known that this was going to happen, all those hundreds of years ago at the time the thing was put there in this sea-sanctuary place.’ I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as a shiver of atavistic dread went through me. To foresee the future with such clarity was quite alarming. But then a more prosaic explanation occurred to me. It was surely more likely that this eating away of the land by the sea had already been under way five hundred years ago. The men who had hidden their precious treasure had simply taken advantage of a natural phenomenon.

Edild once said to me that the best magicians maintain their scepticism and always keep one foot on the ground. My web of destiny might well show me to be earth-poor and not firmly grounded, but it didn’t mean I was totally lacking in common sense and logic.

I glanced at Sibert. He was shaking his head in wonder, his expression distant and dreamy.

Oh, dear. I was not at all sure he was open to common sense or logic just then.

‘So,’ I said brightly, ‘where and what was this sea sanctuary?’ He must have some idea, I thought. Not only that, he must have believed he could find it. Why else had he come along on this mission?

‘I think I know where it used to be,’ he said slowly. ‘When Romain approached me, my first thought was that the — the thing he was after must be whatever it was I overheard Hrype chanting about. I had no idea what it was but I had already worked out where and what the sea sanctuary must be. When Romain told me about the- When Romain explained, it — er, seemed as if everything suddenly fitted together,’ he finished lamely.

He was being deliberately vague. I was sure, however, what it was he was trying not to say: somehow Romain had discovered what Sibert had not. He might not know where this magical treasure was but he knew precisely what it was.

I thought about that. Romain knew what it was and Sibert knew roughly where it was, and they both needed me to pinpoint it for them. The thought gave me a warm glow of satisfaction.

‘Very well,’ I said, deliberately keeping my emotions out of my voice. ‘Where was it, this sea sanctuary, and what sort of a building was it?’

‘It was not a building. It was a circle of wooden posts, in the centre of which there was the stump of an oak tree, its trunk buried in the ground and its roots open to the air. It used to be some distance inland. Now’ — slowly he shook his head, as if he still could not absorb the vast change in the landscape — ‘now it’s out there somewhere.’ He waved an arm in a sweeping gesture towards the smooth sea, where no structure of any size or shape broke the surface for as far as the eye could see.

But I hardly registered his last words. I was almost in shock; I could not have been more amazed. What he had just described was a replica of one of the places Edild had told me about. It was up on the coast to the north of the Fens and one of the most sacred locations of our ancient ancestors. It was one of the deep mysteries — that much I knew. The upturned tree stump was a symbol of the link between the living and the dead; between us and the world of our ancestors, which was a mirror image of our own that co-existed beneath the earth, so that they walked the same ground as we did but upside down. It sounded quite bizarre to me and I was confused because I thought it was something to do with Yggdrasil, the world tree, but that, Edild said, was because I did not yet understand. How right she was. She had promised to take me to the sanctuary in the north one day when I was further advanced in my studies and, at my present lowly stage of learning, the prospect was more frightening than exciting.

Now it appeared that there was another such structure here at Drakelow. Well, I knew from my granny Cordeilla’s tales that the forefathers had lived on the coast at Dunwich, so it was possible. Did Edild know about this one? Had she seen it? If not, it was too late now because it had gone.

I realized suddenly what I should have appreciated straight away: Sibert’s people had not built their sea sanctuary. They had utilized a place of power that already existed, and had done so for thousands of years. Something about it had called out to them in their urgent need and they had responded.

I felt shaky with the impact of what I had just learned. I wished fervently that Edild were with me; she would have calmed me, helped me to understand and, I was quite sure, told me what I ought to do next. For I was — we were — faced with a problem. The place that Sibert must locate and where I must use my special skill was under the water and, for the present, I had no idea what we were going to do about it.