Avalon (18 page)

“It might happen, but the truth is, I do not know. It might be ignominy and disaster; you might be reviled and vilified. You might even be killed.”

“Triumph or tragedy,” James murmured.

Embries made no move, but his golden eyes darkened with a wild, almost savage excitement. “Come with me, James. I cannot tell you what lies ahead, but I can promise you it will be the adventure of your life. Whatever happens, we will make a noise the world will never forget.”

James believed him. His words had the unmistakable ring of truth, and his sincerity was powered by a conviction so pure as to be radiant. Even so, James could not make himself take that first step.

Perhaps it was the fact that he had been roughly two days without sleep. Perhaps it was stupid bullheadedness. He said, “Can I have the night to think it over? I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“No.” Embries shook his head slowly, his golden hawk’s eyes narrowing slightly. “Tomorrow will be too late, James. The time has come, and will not come again.”

Still, James hesitated. He could feel the strain coming off Embries in waves — as if he were being shaken by a tremendous power which he was struggling to keep under control.

“This is the moment. You must choose now.”

The Tempest swooped low over the smooth, winter-bare hills above Glen Morven, the land rippling beneath the bleached white glare of the searchlights. James’ admiration for Rhys’ skills had grown as the trip progressed; he handled the fast, sleek helicopter with cool, calm precision in the best tradition of the RAF.

“Here,” said Embries, his voice sounding far away in the headset. “This is the place.”

It was dead of night when they had left Glen Slugain Lodge. Like a man in a dream, James had stumbled across the black, formless lawn to the waiting aircraft. They had strapped themselves into their seats — Rhys and James in the cockpit, and Embries behind. Rhys handed around the headsets as he warmed up the engine, and then, finishing his preflight check, he opened the throttle and up they went, spinning slowly into an infinite, star-dusted darkness.

They made a long, lazy turn and headed northwest, away from Braemar and out over the wild hills of the Forest of Mar. After a time, Rhys shifted onto a southwesterly course and held it. James settled back and tried to enjoy the ride, but aside from the solitary light from a farmhouse or car on a road, or the distant glow of a town, there was nothing to see. Soon even those small markers dwindled and disappeared.

Darkness above, darkness below, they might have been inside the belly of a whale or down in the deepest cavern. All sense of motion ceased. It seemed to James that they hung suspended between heaven and earth, frozen in time and space. Faces illuminated by the green glow of the instrument panel, they sat in a lightly vibrating cocoon, the universe around cloaked, hidden, unseen and unknown. James listened to the fluttering rumble of the engine — deadened by the headset, it sounded like a continuous low mumbling thunder — and felt himself enter a kind of waking sleep.

Although he remained conscious of himself and his surroundings — Rhys alert and silent beside him, the thrumming whoosh of the blades, the dull wind wash, and all-encompassing darkness — his thoughts cascaded over him in a confused yet compelling jumble of incidental detail from the last two days: the metallic tang of the air in London, light falling on the carpeted stairs at Kenzie House, the slap of his windscreen wipers on the drive home from Pitlochry, the crumpled papers in Collins’ hands, the smack of his leather soles on the pavement in the park, the quavery organ at the church service, the slick feel of the old photocopied birth certificate, the boiled-cabbage smell of Howard Gilpin’s house, Cal’s goofy lovestruck grin as Isobel swayed from the room… and on and on.

James remained in this peculiar state for an indeterminate time — an age, an eon — awake but dreaming, his mind turning and turning, thoughts spinning, revolving, images forming in bizarre kaleidoscopic combinations, only to splinter and reform in yet more strange associations. Time, like the world outside, dwindled away to nothing; it might exist, but it had no substance, no meaning. James, too, simply existed: alive but inert, outwardly immobile but inwardly a flurry of frantic, disjointed activity.

Then, after an eternity, Embries spoke. “Here. This is the place,” and James started at the sound of his voice. In the pale globe of light below, he saw the undulating ground coming up fast beneath them. A moment later, the aircraft touched down. It was still dark. James had no idea how long they had flown or where they were. Rhys killed the engine and the lights, and they sat for a moment, waiting for the blades to stop whirling. They then stepped out onto a silent landscape. There was not a sound to be heard — no cars, no farm dog barking in the distance, not even the wind rustling the coarse, dry grass at their feet.

“We need a fire, I think,” Embries announced.

Good luck finding anything for a fire in the dark
, James thought. Yet, he felt a sudden warmth and turned around to see yellow tongues of flame building to a decent blaze.

They stood beside the fire, warming themselves. James, almost dead on his feet, found himself reflecting on what a peculiar situation this had become. Step by logical step, he had progressed from the mundane to the marvelous in the space of two days. Stranger still, despite the oddness of the circumstances, it felt perfectly natural to be standing there in the bleak midnight, feeling the fire on his face and hands — an activity as old as mankind, he thought.

Then Embries started to sing.

He simply opened his mouth, and an extraordinary voice poured out — liquid, rich, deep, and wonderful, like fine rare wine flowing out into the night.

James was so amazed by the unexpectedness of this that it took him a moment to realize he could not understand a word Embries was singing. It sounded like Gaelic, but it was no Gaelic James had ever heard. The melody was at once piercing and plaintive — achingly bittersweet and soulful in the way of the best old Scottish and Irish ballads: songs about dead lovers, lost causes, fallen champions. James stared entranced as this remarkable man drew breath and with eyes closed released that splendid voice.

He sang with such authority and understanding, with such command of tone and inflection, with such presence, it seemed that he was not merely singing but inhabiting the song. Or that he was becoming himself
through
the song. Even as James watched, it seemed as if his normal outward appearance was peeled away to uncover a much more intriguing, much more mysterious and compelling creature beneath — as if Embries had lifted a mask he was wearing, only to reveal a yet more fantastic face.

Then again, maybe it was James’ peculiar frame of mind — physically close to exhaustion and, thanks to the recent revelations, emotionally fragile — whatever it was, as Embries sang, James felt the
fiosachd
quicken. The skin at the back of his neck tingled, and he began to feel as if he were being pulled in two. It was as if his spirit was a square of cloth snatched up between two monstrous fists determined to tear it in half. He imagined he could actually feel his soul stretching.

At the same time, it seemed to him that the air was hardening around him. He thought,
This is what it feels like to be an insect caught alive in amber
.

The sensation was unnerving: to feel himself stretching, growing ever more tenuous and insubstantial on the inside, yet more concrete and solid on the outside, caused his vision to blur at the edges. He stood before the fire, listening to that magnificent voice and felt himself surrounded by a gentle yet unyielding force; each note of the song seemed to trail a golden silklike thread which encircled James, binding him in shining, luminous whorls.

Then Embries lifted his face to the unseen heavens high above, and the song rose high into the black night. James looked up and saw a glittering spray of red-gold sparks sailing up from the fire. All at once the terrible stretching inside him ceased and he was free. But now it seemed as if he were ascending up through space with the sparks, and that these scintillating flecks of light had somehow gotten inside him. He tingled from head to toe as the
fiosachd
descended upon him with a force he had never experienced. He could feel sparks streaming from his fingertips.

The
fiosachd
enveloped him in a heightened awareness. His senses grew sharp. He could hear the flames rippling over the wood as it hissed and sizzled, releasing the trapped moisture of its cells as steam; each crack and pop of the fire burst upon him like the report of an automatic weapon. He saw not only the flames themselves, pulsing and quivering, but the ultraviolet aura of the flames as well: intertwining coronas surrounding each tongue of flame with a rainbow of multihued crimson. He smelled not only the dusky sharpness of the wood smoke but also the earthy dampness of the moss growing on the bark of the logs.

Slowly, he became aware that Embries’ song was not a meaningless jumble of unknown words; there was movement and repetition within a tightly ordered cycle. He could detect a rhythm involving repeated phrases and gradually, as he listened, an intricate rhyme scheme emerged from the blur of unfamiliar sounds. Curiously, even those foreign-sounding syllables were becoming less unfamiliar all the time.

He concentrated and, to his amazement, plucked out a word from the flow:
croidh
. He understood it as “heart.” Another word passed by and he snatched it up:
anrheg
… “gift.” And so on, like a bear swatting fish from a swift-moving stream, he began to seize the sense of the song. The meaning grew gradually clearer. The more words he captured, the more coherent became the meaning, until he understood that Embries was singing about a man, a hero, the defender of his people, who had gone away, leaving his nation without a…
roof
? No, leaving his nation open and vulnerable, like a house without a roof.

Away to the east, the sky began to lighten. James noticed that the clouds which had obscured the night sky were breaking up and moving off with the approach of dawn. The darkness dimmed around them to a misty luminescence, and all at once Embries stopped singing. He threw wide his arms and cried, “Behold!”

James understood this as a command, and turned. He saw that they stood at the edge of a treeless plain. Before them rose a low, broad hill — not more than a few dozen feet in elevation, it nevertheless occupied a considerable acreage. On the bank of the hill the ground was broken and uneven, the grassy turf pushed and bunched as if giant fists beneath the surface were trying to break through. The top of the hill was more or less flat, and there were numerous low hillocks scattered haphazardly around, and one sizable mound rising roughly from the center. Several shallow ditches ran at angles across the plain and up the gentle slope of the rise, cutting into the bunched and broken mounds. Everything was overgrown with wiry gorse and thistle and sad clumps of sheep-ravaged heather.

Dour and gray in the thin predawn light, the plain and its low rise seemed as lost and forlorn as any forgotten scrag of land anywhere. Mist hung in damp, wraithlike patches, and water dripped from the low branches of the gorse onto the soggy ground. There was nothing at all distinctive about the place, nothing to catch the eye or spark the memory, much less tease the imagination.

Even so, it was as if James had been struck by a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. He saw that God-forsaken plain and thought:
I have been here before
.

But it was impossible. He did not even know where he was — he might have been anywhere north of the border, and there were thousands of places he’d never been. Certainly, this barren landscape with its odd humps and ditches could claim no special place in his memory.

Yet as he turned away from the flames and stepped toward the hill, he knew… he recognized, and recognizing, rejoiced with a wild exultation. He felt exhilarated, thrilled, excited, and awed all at once, for it was the recognition a soldier experiences on his homecoming from foreign wars. It was the recognition of a man for his bride when first he sees her on their wedding day. It was the recognition one feels on meeting a close and dear friend after a long absence.

“Behold!” cried Embries. “The time-between-times!”

And the thought came again, with greater insistence and deeper assurance.
I have been here before
!

James gazed out upon the desolate landscape and shuddered, not with cold but with the unanswerable conviction of familiarity. But not — not as he saw it now. He knew it from another time, when it had been a city, when the mounds and humps and hillocks had been buildings and houses and walls, when the ditches had been streets and roads.

“I know this place,” he declared, glancing across to Embries, who stood tall and erect, arms outspread, face to the rising sun.

Turning back, James took a single step nearer, and the ground shifted beneath his feet. The covering of turf melted away, revealing shaped stone beneath. Another step and the stones appeared to realign themselves on their ancient footings.
Dear God in Heaven
, he gasped inwardly,
what is happening here
?

Dazed by the surge and whirl of potent emotions, he stumbled forward. The walls rose before him, so that after a dozen steps he was no longer standing on a forlorn plain but moving ever more rapidly towards a wide open gateway set in the high protecting walls of a city, a fortress.

Caer Lial
…

The word appeared of itself, and was met with the same recognition. It was the name of the fortress.

Stiff-legged with wonder, he walked up the long ramp towards the high timber gate. He knew there was no gated entrance, no walls, or streets, and yet all those things
were
there, all around him. He had but to reach out his hands to touch them.

Moving onto the ramp, he glanced back over his shoulder to see that the helicopter was gone. The wood had encroached upon the plain. Rhys and Embries were still there by the fire, silent and motionless, watching him. James moved on quickly, suddenly afraid that the vision would fade before he could discover its meaning.