Catherine Fisher - Darkhenge

‘I stood at the back and didn’t say anything, and then when they’d gone I pulled out my notebook and there was paint on it. Dark green paint. On the cover and soaked into the first three pages, so that you couldn’t read them.’”

Helpless, Rob rubbed his hands through his hair.

“‘All the words were lost.’” Vetch’s voice sounded quietly appalled. Through his misery, Rob shivered. “‘All the sounds and meanings, all the words, so carefully chosen. Words that could never fit together again just like that, ever, ever again. And when he came in and saw me crying he said, “Oh, sorry, Chloe. Did your notebook get messed up? I’ll get you another one, don’t worry.” Another notebook. Another girly, pink, fluffy notebook with giggly girly guff inside. That’s what he meant. That’s what he thought—’”

“All right. All right!— ” Rob jumped up and slammed his palm against the bole of an oak. “But I didn’t know! How could I know? She never said. She never told me she was writing anything important, anything that meant something!”

Vetch closed the book. “Paintings are easy to see,” he said after a moment. “Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.”

In the silence that followed they heard how a soft wind had risen; it gusted and creaked the branches. Rob came and sat down, and put his head in his hands. Vast shadows of himself huddled over the tree trunks.

Finally he said, “You mean this is why she doesn’t want to come back.”

“Surely.”

“All the time. All these years!”

Vetch put the notebook carefully in the crane-skin bag. Then he warmed his hands at the candle. “Listen to me, Rob. You’re at fault, yes, for not noticing, but so is she, for not saying. Your gift is the artist’s gift, of looking, and it failed you. Hers is in words and she didn’t speak them. Your parents may not have wanted to see. But Mac must have known.”

Rob tried to think. “Maybe. He always talked a lot to her, asked her about things. School. Friends. Gave her presents. She sort of pretended he was her godfather.”

Vetch nodded, his narrow face in shadow. “A wise man, the priest. He would see, but he’s no poet.”

The room was dark, the candle flame barely glimmering.

“Don’t think this is Chloe.” The poet looked up at him. “This is her jealousy, her anger. Words refine. Sometimes they simplify. Chloe is asleep in that bed, but here she exists as she might be, without love, without memory. We have to get her back. Even more so now.”

Rob wiped his face. “How? She doesn’t want to.”

“It’s worse than that.” Vetch looked rueful. “You’ve seen. She’s discovered that the Unworld is hers to control. She’ll use it against us. And the King has told her that if she reaches the seventh caer and sits in the Chair at its heart, she will be Queen here. Even I won’t be able to take her back.”

Rob nodded bleakly. “Then we have to do whatever it takes.”

“Good.” Vetch stood, and blew the candle out. As soon as he did, they saw night had come. Through the shattered roof of the pearl caer the stars glinted in familiar patterns; the wide constellations of summer, seen through a frost of branches.

Rob shivered. “It’s getting colder.”

Vetch was listening. “She’s brought down a gale.”

Outside, the forest threshed. Leaves slapped against Rob’s face. “Which way?” he gasped, and then had to shout it again so that Vetch could hear.

The poet pulled him into the shelter of a birch tree. “The fifth caer is a fearsome place. The Black Castle, the Fortress of Gloom. She will have to pass through it, and that won’t be easy, even for her. Quickly now.”

But the forest had changed; in the darkness it had become an impenetrable confusion of trees and branches. Without Vetch Rob would have been hopelessly lost. But the poet moved purposefully through the tangle of holly and ash and birch, ducking under branches, forcing his way through thickets. In this part of the wildwood the trees crowded densely. Even the rising gale could only roar in the treetops; down below, the air was musty and thick with spores, stinking of rot. Underfoot the leaf drift was so matted Rob sank in ankle deep; fungal growths cracked and splatted under his weight, and when he grasped the trees to steady himself, their bark was so wet it crumbled to sawdust in his fingers. He sneezed, shivered, wiping damp smears of lichen onto his clothes.

Far off, something howled.

Rob stopped. “What was that?”

They listened, breathless in the crackling, roaring wood. Just as Rob was coming to think he’d imagined it, it rang out again, a high, evil howl, as if a wolf had thrown back its head and was baying to the moon.

Vetch turned and pushed on grimly. “Until now,” he muttered, “the forest has been deserted. I fear its inhabitants are beginning to stir.”

Down a long hillside they ran, where roots sprawled out of the thin soil in networks of silver, half sliding, half skidding, the soil coming away under their feet and rattling into the darkness below. At the bottom was a small stream; Rob caught the gleam of starlight on its blackness. Cold water splashed as Vetch jumped over, then he soaked his own boot with a shock of iciness. It made him shiver like the shock he carried inside him, that he felt he was running away from, the shock of what Chloe had said, her fury at him. Well, I don’t love him. Trying to outrun it, he slammed into Vetch, who gasped, “Keep still!”

The poet’s thin hand grasped his sleeve and drew him down behind an alder clump. “Listen,” he breathed.

Not the howling. But just ahead, through the gusting night, a rhythmic crunch.

Once.

Then again.

Familiar.

Vetch listened to it for a moment. He slid forward. Rob rustled after him.

The night was black. So black and solid it seemed like a wall.

And then he realized it was a wall. A wall of inky stones so smooth the places where they fitted together were impossible to see, and as he lifted his eyes and craned his neck back he realized that it went up so high into the sky that the stars seemed to balance on its top, a vacuum, a wall of nothingness, oily with faint specks of reflected light.

This caer had no door.

And the trees held back from it. Between the edge of the forest and the wall was a rough, splintered stretch of ground, littered with boulders and rubble.

At the foot of the wall, someone was digging.

The chink of the spade was loud; it rang and echoed.

Vetch took a small tense breath, perhaps of relief. Then he stood, and walked out of the trees.

“So here you are,” he said.

The digger stopped, and turned. As she lifted her head, she wiped sweat from her smeared face; Rob saw it gleam. Clare leaned on the spade; she looked as worn and hassled as she had at Darkhenge; her plait was undoing and her dungarees were clotted with mud. But she smiled. “Been waiting for you, Vetch.”

He stopped.

Mistrust came over him; Rob saw how his eyes moved warily over the rubbled soil. But all he said was, “You pushed me down. In the darkness.”

She shrugged. “Do you blame me?”

“You could have killed me.”

She turned back to the wall, so they couldn’t see her face. “Well, I didn’t. There’s no way in here. We have to dig under.”

Vetch shook his head. “It would take too long.” He looked at her, considering, then up. “Climbing would be better. There will be a door; we can find it.”