one from a neighbour.’
Aelis looked out. The forest of the Arrouaise was tight about them, its big oaks in bud, the river gentle and pleasant.
‘Do you think he can help me?’
Aelis knew what the answer would be — Leshii was never going to say ‘no’. But she wanted some reassurance, even the sort the merchant had to offer — which was not much different to the patter he used to sell his wares.
‘If Chakhlyk thinks so, then I think so. He has laid down his life for you, so I think you can trust him.’
‘He said he was doing this for love. Do you know what he meant?’
‘Love of money, very likely.’ Leshii saw the joke had gone down badly. ‘Who knows, lady? These men are full of riddles. He is a sorcerer, a shapeshifter. His words can have a thousand meanings and none. I do not look too deeply.’
Aelis leaned back in the boat. The mule had gone down onto its haunches. Leshii was steering — the current was strong enough that they didn’t often need to row — and Aelis tried to sleep. It was cold but she was tired. The movement of the boat lulled her. She felt herself sinking and couldn’t tell if she was awake or dreaming.
‘You did it before; you can do it again.’ A voice, a woman’s voice.
She suddenly sat upright, reaching for her sword. She was on the boat still but it was night, the river cloaked in a strange dark in which moonlight turned the water to a shimmering veil of silver, the leaves of the trees to pewter, the sky to a forge-blackened steel. She had known that darkness before. At Loches, when she had walked in the night.
There was someone with her on the boat, but she couldn’t make her head turn to look. Where was Leshii? Nowhere. Where was the mule? Nowhere.
‘You did it before. Do it again.’
‘What did I do before?’
‘What you needed to. What you will do again. Do it.’
It seemed to Aelis that the river was flowing through a very strange place indeed. It was underground, and there were no stars, just the glimmer of strange shining pebbles in the dark; no trees, just great trunks of rock dropping from the ceiling of a huge tunnel.
The boat came to shore by a small black beach. A tunnel stretched away in front of her. She got out and followed it down into the earth. From somewhere far off she could hear a monstrous grinding sound, the like of which she had never heard. It was like a great stone moving over rock. In the streets of Paris she’d once seen a pair of horses harnessed to a cart spooked by a dancing bear. The cart had hit another, smashing a wheel and breaking a horse’s leg. The uninjured animal had panicked and tried to bolt, the cart scraping behind, the lame horse screaming and staggering. This sound was also of something stricken, broken, and brought with it a sensation of deep agony, something wrong in the order of nature. But Aelis felt compelled to seek it out.
She walked down the tunnel, and though it was dark, she could see. A light seemed to shine from within her, and she realised that another of those strange symbols had lit up inside her. This was nothing like the horse symbol: it did not breathe, it did not sweat, and though it shone, it was not with the lustre of a horse’s coat but with an intense flame. It was a much smaller presence than the horse symbol, not at all expansive but dense and bright with a light that seemed to illuminate not only her vision but her mind so that she became aware of the teeming darkness pricked by lights that spread out across the earth. There were so many living things around her shining from the vast night, she felt like a bright cold star in the twinkling field of the heavens.
‘You did it before. Do it again.’
‘What?’
‘Your lover is dead but he will live again. Without you if your courage fails.’
Aelis looked around her. Just the tunnels, just the rock. She couldn’t see where the voice was coming from. Then the tunnel dipped and turned, grew narrow. A gap was to her right, no more than a fissure in the rock. Something glistened and shone on the wall next to it. She put out her hand and touched it. She looked at her fingers. They were wet and shiny. She couldn’t see the red of the blood, the whole cave was bathed in a lead light that turned everything to shades of grey but she sensed red. Aelis went through the crack in the rock, edging herself sideways to get in. She was not a big woman but still it was a breath-crushing push, the fissure so narrow that at points she had to wriggle to get through. But she did get through. She was in a room, a small chamber just high enough to stand in, though after ten paces it began to taper to nothing, the jagged ceiling coming down to a sharp and stony floor like the jaws of a great animal.
It was a scene of carnage. On the floor lay a huge wolf, its eyes vacant, its tongue lolling, its throat cut, a pool of blood about it. It was dying, and the noise it made was a wet rasp that seemed to fill up her mind, leaving her incapable of thinking of anything else. The wolf’s breathing quickened when it saw her and it tried to get up, though it seemed fatally wounded and could not stand. She did not feel afraid and went forward to put her hand on its great head. Its eyes turned to hers and they seemed almost human, full of longing.
Next to it lay three bodies, or the remains of bodies. One was a man with long silver hair, his hand still clasped around the handle of a strange curved sword. She had seen that before. It was the Raven’s sword. The second hardly existed. It was no more than a ripped spinal cord hanging from a skull like a bloody plait. It was female, that was all she could say. The other body she knew. Its face was instantly familiar.
The man wore a dark wolfskin about him, and his muscles were strong and taut, but a gout of flesh had been ripped from his side. She thought of Sindre, who had struggled to rescue her from that thing with the torn face, but this was not Sindre. Though the face was much stronger, more vigorous, not drawn or wasted like that of the monk, still she recognised him. It was Jehan, the confessor. Aelis felt her throat tighten, tears come to her eyes. She heard her own voice speaking: ‘I loved you but the gods did not love us.’
Someone was watching her but she could not see who.
She knelt at the confessor’s side and pulled back the wolfskin from his face. He was dead. She lifted him. His body felt light in her arms. She dragged him through the fissure in the rock, pulling him through until she was back in the larger passageway.
Aelis felt a breeze on her right side and looked to see where it was coming from. An archway of light was there. She walked towards it.
Lady! Lady! Another voice. She recognised it. It was the merchant.
She stepped into the arch and found herself looking out over a broad and beautiful land of mountains and rivers. To her right she saw the ocean, to her left a wide and fertile valley. She was very high up indeed; wisps of cloud hung beneath her. When she looked down, the ground seemed to rush and swim, and she knew that if she stepped forward, she would fall to her death.
‘You did it before; you can do it again.’
Lady, put down the sword. Lady, you will hurt yourself.
‘Do it. For your lover.’
She looked over her shoulder. Behind her was the creature with the defiled and torn face, the woman whose head looked like a gall apple on an oak rather than anything human.
But then she felt a light burning inside her. She felt something manifesting in her mind — a shape, two lines at an angle, like a K but without the vertical line, an arrowhead. It flamed and burned, crackled and shone, and when it shone it threw out a light that illuminated everything before it in a way far beyond sight.
The man in her arms had the confessor’s face, but it was not the confessor.
‘He is not dead,’ she said.
‘He is on the brink. If you go, he will know and he will follow you.’
‘He is not dead. I know who he is and so do you.’
Lady, lady, put it down, for the sake of the lord of the holy lightning. What do you mean to do? Does not your religion forbid it? A Christian must not take his own life. You must not take your own life.
Leshii was gesturing at her with his hands raised as if trying to coax a valuable vase from the hands of a two-year-old. To Aelis he was an insubstantial figure. The reality of the caves seemed stronger.
‘See my lover. Your pretence is undone,’ Aelis said.
She turned and showed the face of the man in her arms to the woman behind her. The creature fell back and clasped the side of the cave, then fell to the floor and screamed, a piercing frightful noise that had within it the tortured cries of foxes in traps that Aelis had heard in the night at Loches, the screams of relatives of thieves
