Guy Kay - Ysabel

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.”

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?”

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.”