‘No,’ he said, then louder, calling: ‘No.’ He ran along the border of the shadow even as it seemed to shudder and unravel in the weakening horizontal light, to a place where new lights, lying further off the others, and shining more faintly in the shade of the stone, now gleamed into shape.
They sickled away from the others, describing a pattern that curved back towards the north, revealing that the shape they had seen earlier was no line, but the beginning of a wide arc pointing to the north-east.
‘It’s down here,’ Fitz called. He was standing on the lip of the height, looking down towards the whirlpool they had passed earlier. From this vantage, it was hard to see how they had missed it: following the spiralling arm patterned out by the stone’s windowed lights, a ruined set of stairs circled in an anticlockwise arc from the summit of the island down to a sort of platform or ledge cut out of the island’s tough basalt. As the others reached him, Fitz had but to wave his arm to the left, and they saw it instantly.
‘This must have been very beautiful, once,’ said Navy.
‘And as obvious as the day itself,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘I doubt we’ll find anything that hasn’t been found before.’
They set off down the slope, almost skipping from one to another of the heavy stone slabs that had once formed the steps of a grand and sloping stairway, cut or shaped from the rock of the cliffside. Now that they knew where they were, and what they were seeing, they recognized on many of the slabs of stone the same curious and cursive carving, now largely eroded, that covered the menhir at the island’s summit. Here and there, too, a socket lay empty, and some of these sockets were cracked, where perhaps a gem had been set, or a metal or polished stud. Fitz’s eyes took it all in, greedily, as they passed in the sloping shadow. The evening thickened around them, cooling and congealing, while they descended, until at last they stood beside the ledge they had glimpsed from above – a sandstone platform grooved with wide trenches and sockets that seemed to suggest it had once been the site of a substantial structure, nestled against the cliff.
‘It’s gone,’ said Mr Ahmadi. The tight weave of his temples had slackened, and his skin, like his cape, seemed to drag at his shoulders.
Navy was eyeing the approach to the platform. The edge of the cliff where they stood dropped in a smooth cascade away, steep and almost polished by the wind and rain. This perilous drop sloped round the platform and out of sight, sliding into the sea near the centre of the whirlpool they had seen churning on their ascent. They could still hear its ominous purr from below. Before them, access to the platform was nearly impossible; a three-metre chunk of the cliff had been washed away, and that which remained, so narrow a path as to be almost impassable, lay across a plinth of dark rock riven by a menacing crack.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Navy. ‘There are markings there, on the inner wall.’ She gestured round to the left, where on the cliff face the remnants of stone carving might – could it? – be seen in the diminishing light.
She tried her foot on the stone plinth. It held.
‘Navy,’ barked Mr Ahmadi. Severe and monitory, his voice drove through the air like a mallet.
Navy seemed not to notice. She was already out of reach, placing one foot directly in front of the other as she inched across the narrow path. Mr Ahmadi didn’t dare follow her; his own weight might be enough to break the unsteady ledge, but combined with Navy’s it would certainly send them both plunging on to the rocks below. Fitz stood paralysed. He wanted to reach out to pull her back, and yet knew that his arms would come back filled only with air.
‘I’m nearly there,’ she said, half-trying to reassure them as she closed the last part of the gap, half-trying to reassure herself. Fitz didn’t dare look down.
The stone made no noise at all as it gave way. Massive and solid, it operated by those laws reserved for slow and silent things. It didn’t drop but gave itself away, not falling but almost floating into the chasm that yawned beneath it.
But Navy made noise. With a tremendous yell, a barbaric holler that she seemed to summon from her feet, at once she pushed with her legs and against the cliff wall with her arms, trying to launch herself on to the high part of the polished slope that lay just beneath them. She half succeeded, clearing the path of the tumbling stone, and landing almost flat against the steep slide. For a moment she hung there, trying somehow to dig in for purchase, clawing with her nails.
Fitz dropped to his stomach and pushed his arm down the slope as far as it would reach. His fingertips were inches from Navy’s. Without looking at him, breathing in big and effortful gasps, she coiled on her legs and unleashed her hand at his, wildly, like a whip’s end. He caught it. With the tips of his fingers he caught it. With the last hyperextended yearning of his arm he caught it. The pain seared through his shoulder, his elbow and his wrist, but he caught it.
He caught it, but he couldn’t hold it.
Beneath the surface of his nails, his skin blanched. The joints of his fingers, which at first had curled tight and muscular against Navy’s wrist, began to draw open under the weight of her body. She scrambled against the cliff face as Mr Ahmadi gently tried to pull Fitz’s own shoulders and chest back from the edge, stabilizing him even as he also ground his ribs and sternum into the sharp stone below.
‘Don’t let me go,’ she whispered, the words hissing through her exertion like the
