Guy Kay - Ysabel

“Which means what?” Greg asked, eyes meeting Ned’s in the rear-view mirror.

“Means Aunt Kim’s right, maybe,” Ned said. “There should be a way to find some place that…connects up. Or makes sense. I mean, they have to do it, so we can too, right? There has to be some logic to it?”

“Well, it would be easier if we could narrow it to a bit less than twenty-five hundred years,” his father said.

“Now you sound like me last night,” Ned said.

Greg snorted.

“God and His angels forfend,” his father said, and turned back to watch the road.

Edward Marriner was carrying two cameras, a digital and an SLR. More for comfort, Ned thought, than anything else. It had occurred to him, getting into the van, that on the viewfinder side of a camera you had a buffer between you and the world.

There were a lot of ideas coming to him these days for the first time. Looking out the window, he saw the turnoff for Les Baux coming up. Traffic slowed as cars made the left.

“Straight on, Gregory,” Edward Marriner said, checking the map.

“Road goes to Saint-Rémy, we pull off just before.”

“I got it,” Greg said. “It’s on the signs.”

“What is that?” Ned asked. “Up there? Les Baux?”

“Medieval hill town, castle ruins. Pretty spectacular.”

“You’ve been?”

“With your mother, before you were born.”

“On our list?”

“Not for this. Oliver and Barrett have it down for the book. Though it probably could be for this, too. Best I gather, the Celts were all over this place before the Romans came.”

“It’s way up there,” Greg said. “Look close.”

They were waiting for the cars ahead of them to turn. Ned looked out the left-side window. What appeared at first to be crumbled rock was actually the smashed-up remains of a long castle wall at the top of the mountain. It blended in almost perfectly.

“Wow,” he said.

His father was looking too. “They used to throw their enemies from those walls, the story goes.”

“Nice of them. When?”

“Medieval times. The Lords of Les Baux they were called. Louis XIII sent cannons up to the castle a few hundred years after. Blew it apart. Thought it was too dangerous for local lords to have a fortress that strong.”

Ned shook his head. The Romans with siege engines at Entremont, same thing here with cannons.

“I thought you told me we were coming to a beautiful, peaceful place.”

His father glanced back. “I’m sure I told you beautiful. I doubt I was so foolish as to say peaceful.”

“Besides,” Greg said in a joking voice, “when do fifteen-year-old dudes want it peaceful?”

“Could use some about now,” Ned said.

They came up to the intersection, waited for the car ahead to go left, and carried on through.

“This next bit here’s called the Valley of Hell,” Edward Marriner said. “Melanie has a note it may have inspired Dante.” He had her notebook, among the other papers he was carrying.

“He was here too?” Greg asked.

“Everyone was here,” Ned’s father replied. “That’s sort of the point. There were popes in Avignon for a while, long story. Dante was an emissary at one time.”

“I can see it,” Ned heard Greg saying. “Valley of Hell, I mean. Look at those boulders.” The landscape had become harsh and barren quite suddenly as they wound a narrow route between cliffs. A few splashes of colour from wildflowers seemed to emphasize, not reduce, the bleakness. It was darker, the cliffs hiding the sun. It felt lonely and desolate. Looking around, Ned began to feel uneasy.

“Barrett has this place down too,” Edward Marriner was saying.

“For the landscape. Another side of Provence.”

But his voice had retreated, seemed somehow farther than the front seat. There was something else, inside, pushing it away. Ned took a deep breath, fighting panic. He didn’t feel ill, not like at Sainte-Victoire, but he did feel…distant. And really odd.

“Can you stop for a second?” he said.

Without hesitation, without a word, Greg swerved the van onto the shoulder, which was not all that wide. The driver behind them—close behind them—blasted his horn and shot past. Greg came to a hard stop.

“What is it? Ned?”

His father had turned again and was looking at him. The expression on his face, a mixture of fear and awe, was unsettling. A father shouldn’t have to look at his kid like that, Ned thought.

“Feeling something,” he muttered.

He searched inwardly. Nothing tangible—only a disquiet, like a pulsebeat, a faint drumming.

“Does…do we have anything on what’s here? What might have been around this place?”

Edward Marriner pulled a notebook from his leather case on the floor. There were labelled, coloured tabs separating it into sections. His father flipped through, found a page, skimmed it. He shook his head.

“There were quarries for bauxite, which gets its name from Les Baux. Those are finished now. She mentions the Valley of Hell. Dante. A quote from Henry James about driving in a carriage through here. She thought we might use it.”

“Nothing else?”

Greg was looking back at him too. “You feeling sick?”

“Not that. But there’s something.”

Ned shifted to the right side of the van and opened the door. He got out. He stood by the side of the road, trying to understand what he was feeling. Traffic was lighter now, an occasional car went past. Greg had the flashers on. The high cliffs on both sides cast the road into shadow. It was chilly. The wind blew from the north. Not a mistral, but not comforting, either. Valley of Hell.

“You think she’s here?” Greg asked through a rolled-down window.

Ned shook his head. “No. I think what I’m getting is older, from the past. I think I’m feeling something from back then, not from now.”

“But not as bad as before, right?” Greg asked.

Ned looked through the window past his father at Greg, whose face was a lot like Edward Marriner’s now. Fear, and a kind of diffident respect. It was a bit scary to realize it, but they believed him.

“Not as bad,” he said. “Just the same sense of something still here. The same kind of…” He fought for the words. “Breaking through?”

“You mean from medieval times? The castle at Les Baux?” His father’s forehead was really creased now, Ned saw. The struggle to make sense of this.

Ned thought about it. He walked away towards the cliff and looked up at it. Then he came back and shook his head again. “Can’t tell. I’m no good at this, but I think it goes further back.” He took another breath. “We’ll ask Kate. Or look it up. But I think we can go on. I don’t feel anything here from, like, now. This is just weird, that’s all.”

His dad looked as if he was about to disagree, then he sighed and shrugged. “I’m out of my league,” he said.

Ned got back in and slid the door shut. Greg looked back at him for a second, then put the car in gear and started forward again.

They passed through that closed-in arid canyon in silence, came out of shadow into springtime fields and vineyards and sunlight again. Moments later they saw the Roman arch and a tower on the left side of the road—right beside it.

There was another brown sign pointing towards the ruins of Glanum down an angled, tree-lined path on the other side.

Greg pulled into a gravel parking lot directly in front of the arch. The lot was almost empty. Ned got out. He saw a couple of families spreading an early picnic on the grass beyond. Kids were playing soccer. He felt like an alien watching them, someone from a different world, just intersecting theirs.

Greg walked over to look at the arch, and the taller, oddly shaped structure beside it. Ned’s father stopped beside him.