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
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.
'
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.
'The first thing we learn at school,' Buddug said, not even panting with the exertion, 'is to be polite to our elders.'
Bethan fell in a heap to the soft snow and sat there half-stunned, her back to the wall, feeling the blood running freely from her nose or her mouth. Her glasses had gone.
'And the next thing we learn—' Buddug bent down and dragged her to her feet, tearing her white mac at the shoulders ' — is to stand up when we are spoken to.'
Bethan lolled, feeling her eyes glazing.
'Don't you go to sleep!' Buddug hit her again with a hand that felt as sharp and heavy as a wood-axe.
Buddug hissed, 'You killed our baby.'
Bethan tried to speak. Saw Buddug's hand raised again and shrank back against the wall.
'We like them to be pure-bred if possible,' Buddug said. 'Dilwyn's was a mistake. The child has to work harder, see, because of its mother.'
'You're sick,' Bethan whispered through swollen lips. 'Go on, hit me again. What more can you do?'
'Idwal!' They heard from inside the church, a weak and despairing cry. 'Help me, willya!'
Bethan's heart sagged in her limp body. Buddug's lumpen features cracked with glee. Do you love him?'
Bethan desperately shook her head.
'You will not miss him, then, when he is gone. They will leave him tonight to see how much he can do to
