The Bone House Page 8

  Snipe, of course, was the weak link in the close-forged chain Douglas had so painstakingly constructed; the young man could not read or write simple English, let alone Latin, and it was always an open question whether the youth fully comprehended even the most basic points of human interaction, or whether he just did not care to accommodate any manner of civilised discourse. This was the reality of working with Snipe, and Douglas had taken it fully into account. Accordingly, he proceeded on the premise that if anyone should happen to overhear them speaking to one another, the eavesdropper would simply conclude he was hearing some dialect of thirteenth-century Irish, and not modern English. Should the need arise, Douglas stood ready to assist this false impression in sundry ways.

  As for the various creature comforts, he had provided himself with a small personal cache of silver and gold—cast in tiny ingots or sticks as described in old manuscripts—which he kept in a kidskin bag in the satchel. But, as common priests were not expected to carry much in the way of worldly wealth, he would keep that out of sight and resort to it only as needed. For most things, he would depend on the kindness of strangers and the largesse of Mother Church.

  The last, but by no means least, item to be secured was the location of the ley that they would employ to make the leap into medieval Oxford. Initially this had posed an intractable difficulty. Try as he might, Douglas could not find any reference to a ley that had Oxford as its destination, or even south-central England in the early Middle Ages. None of his father’s papers or books, none of the usual sources upon which he relied, had so much as a mention of where such a ley might be found.

  To be sure, he did possess that portion of the Skin Map he had liberated from Sir Henry’s trunk in the Christ Church crypt. This was, at present, virtually worthless to him because the map was in his great-grandfather’s peculiar code, which he could not read: the very reason he aspired to 1260 in the first place.

  Douglas had begun to suspect the problem was insoluble when he remembered Alfred Watkins’ book, The Old Straight Track. In the pages of that book he found not only a reference to an Oxford ley but a simple hand-drawn map of it as well. Ordinarily he would not have looked twice at this. For, after all, ley lines always led to other places and times . . . did they not? The idea that there could be a ley in a certain place linking that same place to its other-dimensional counterpart had never occurred to him.

  Could there be self-connecting leys?

  He did not know. Yet it was a very simple theory to test. All he had to do was find the Oxford ley and try it. And this he did.

  One morning before dawn—and before the traffic virtually consumed the road—Douglas, armed with a diagram he had copied from Watkins’ book, walked out onto the High Street. A few false tries, a lot of pacing, retracing, and sidestepping, but he eventually sensed the tingle on his skin that told him he had located a ley. After another attempt or two, he achieved a successful crossing—a fact not completely realised until he reached the crossroads and saw torches burning outside Saint Martin’s church.

  Douglas hurried to the crossroads he knew as Carfax and paused to search for any clue that might establish the date of this particular iteration of Oxford. The buildings were mostly the same ones he recognised, but of more recent age; the streets were not paved with tarmac, but with cobblestones; heaps of dung mouldered at the street corner. There was no one else around, so he could not derive a guess from clothing. He might have been able to delve a little deeper into this mystery, but the sun was just rising and he knew that he must either depart again at once or spend at least one day and maybe more in this place. He was not prepared for that, so he ran back to the ley and made the jump back to the home world—albeit, three days later by the calendar.

  Over the next few weeks Douglas made many more excursions, calibrating by trial and error the distance coordinates along the ley that corresponded with what he thought of as the Otherworld timescale. In the end, he succeeded in locating the era that formed the centre of his search, as confirmed by the Roll of Vicars plaque on the wall of Saint Mary the Virgin church.

  Satisfied that he had done all he could to prepare, Douglas pulled the hood over his robe, settled it on his shoulders, and stepped to the mirror. The image reflected there was of a healthy and well-nourished man of middle height and weight dressed in a good, serviceable robe of a country priest. The newly shaved tonsure on his head completed the effect. He smiled at his reflection.

  “Come along, Snipe,” he said, stepping quickly to the door. “It is time to go.”

  They walked out from the town house and proceeded towards the centre of Oxford. It was just before daybreak, but being a busy modern city, there were already a few people about. They passed a milkman and his mule and some black-gowned students asleep in doorways. At Broad Street, a rag and bone man with his pushcart trundled along, and on Turl Street the lamplighter with his pole was putting out the last lights. If anyone marked the strange apparition of a pair of medieval monks flapping towards city centre, they did not show it. In a place like Oxford, where students still wore the vestiges of medieval robes to tutorials and their professors still addressed formal assemblies in Latin, things that might have been considered an oddity to be remarked upon anywhere else were merely too common to be afforded attention.

  They followed Turl Street to the end and turned onto the High, joining the ley line as it ran towards Carfax. Here Douglas paused. “Ready, Snipe?” he asked. “Do not be afraid, and do not make a fuss. You have done this before. Remember?” When this brought no response, Douglas gave him a light slap on the cheek. “Remember?”

  The surly youth shook his head.

  “Good. Then hold on.” He extended his hand to the lad, who gripped it tight. “Here we go!”

  They began walking very quickly along the street, and Douglas counted off the steps. As he fell into the optimum stride, he looked for the marker he had chalked on the base of Gill the Ironmonger’s shop a few meters from the corner. As they approached the crossroads, a gaggle of students—either hastening to their studies or returning from the night’s revels—straggled by. Douglas’ first instinct was to turn and flee—to have his sudden and inexplicable dematerialisation publicly witnessed seemed far too risky. He wavered on the brink of abandoning the attempt.

  That impulse was swiftly jostled aside by another: What did he care if a passel of bleary-eyed scholastics got an eyeful? What did it matter if they talked? What difference would it make?

  He saw the chalk mark and stepped up his pace. A sound like a banshee howl reached them, falling through the upper atmosphere. In the same instant, a stiff wind gusted out of nowhere, driving a sudden rain shower. The street and buildings, the bus and its passengers, all the world around them grew misty and indistinct. Then they were falling through darkness—but only for a moment, the fractional interval between one heartbeat and the next—before striking solid earth again.

  Snipe stumbled upon landing and went down on hands and knees; his lips curled in a curse that was interrupted by a gagging sound as his stomach heaved. Douglas, too, felt the incipient nausea. Bile surged up his throat, but he swallowed it back down. Resisting the urge to shut his eyes, he tried to maintain contact with some physical object, fixing his gaze on the steeple of Saint Martin’s church rising like a dagger blade pointing towards the heart of heaven.

  The queasy sensation passed, and he drew fresh air into his lungs. “Breathe, Snipe,” he advised the heaving boy beside him. “Don’t fight. It will pass.”

  He glanced quickly around. A pair of figures moved among the shadows a short distance away—too far to have seen them arrive, he thought. Indeed, the only living thing to have seen the translocation was a scrawny dog standing in the road a little way off, its head lowered and hackles raised. Douglas kicked a dirt clod in its direction, and the animal scurried off.

  The light was dim—but was it early morning or evening? He looked to the east and saw only darkness, yet the western sky still held a glimmer o
f light. Nightfall, then. “Stand up, Snipe,” he commanded. “Wipe your mouth. We made it. We are here.”

  The youth climbed to his feet, and the two moved slowly on towards the church. Douglas paused at the crossroads to look both ways up and down each street, getting his bearings. Much of the town that he knew was here—in a general sense, as old Oxford of the medieval period remained in the outlines of the modern city—and he recognised it. He knew where he was, now to find out when. That was the first item of business—to find out the exact date and time.

  As the two travellers hurried across the road, a monk carrying a large candle appeared in the doorway of the church. The fellow proceeded to light the torches in the sconces either side of the door. He turned, saw the strangers, and called to them in a language Douglas assumed was some local dialect. He had his reply ready. “Pax vobiscum,” he said, folding his hands before him and offering a small bow from the waist. Summoning his practised Latin, he said, “May grace attend you this night, brother.”

  The monk responded likewise. “Peace, brothers.” He made to retreat into the church once more. “May God be good to you.”

  “A moment, brother,” called Douglas, striding forward. “We have just arrived in this place and have need of information.”

  The monk turned back and waited for them to come nearer. “Have you travelled far?” he said, his Latin tinged by his broad, oddly flattened accent.

  “Far enough,” replied Douglas. “I am charged with a duty to find one known as Dr. Mirabilis—a fellow priest, I have it, whose writings have reached us in Eire.”

  The monk rolled his eyes. “You and all the rest of the world!”

  “Am I right in thinking that he reside hereabouts?”

  “He does,” replied the monk without enthusiasm. “He has rooms in one of the university inns—I cannot say which one.” He turned and started into the church.

  “Perhaps you can tell me how best to find him?” Douglas called after him; he put on an expectant expression in the hope of coaxing more information from the reluctant fellow.

  “I must beg your pardon, brother, but no,” replied the monk over his shoulder. “However, that is no hardship, for unless you are supremely blessed, you cannot safely avoid him.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In Which Full Disclosure Takes a Drubbing

  The rumbling growl of the young cave cat announced the arrival of the new day, waking the sleepers. The Burley Men roused themselves and set about their allotted daily chores: one to feed Baby, one to make breakfast, one to see to the prisoners. Dex had drawn that last straw. So, slipping his feet into sandals and pulling on his desert kaftan, he shuffled out of the tent. The sun was up, though still so low that the early-morning light did little to penetrate the shadows of the wadi. He drew a deep breath of clean morning air and, yawning, started for the tomb entrance.

  Since Burleigh had ordered that no more food or water was to be given to the captives until they agreed to talk, he did not bother filling the water can or food pan. Nor did he bother firing up the generator for the lights. What he needed to learn could be discovered in the semidarkness of High Priest Anen’s tomb.

  Pressing a hand to the stairwell stone, he descended the narrow steps into the tomb’s vestibule, paused a moment to allow his eyes to adjust, then proceeded into the first chamber. He crossed the empty room to the door of the smaller second room, wherein lay the remains of the great granite sarcophagus that had once contained the coffin of the high priest. This room was secured by an iron grate. All was quiet in the darkened chamber.

  He approached. No one stirred at his arrival.

  Dex stood listening for a moment, but heard nothing—neither the brush and rustle of men moving about, nor even the intake and exhalation of sleeping men breathing. The tomb was silent.

  “Wakey! Wakey!” he called, his voice loud in the emptiness. “You’re wasting the best of the day!” He smiled at his little jest.

  There was no response.

  “Are you dead in there?” he called and considered that this was only too likely to be the case, and that the captives had succumbed in the night, following Cosimo and Sir Henry—two right royal pains in the arse if ever there were—into the grave.

  Splendid, now he would have to go and fire up the generator, turn on the lights, and then get the key and come back and deal with the bodies. Bloody bother, muttered Dex inwardly. But before he went to all that trouble, he decided to make sure the two remaining captives were not merely sleeping after all. Thinking to rattle the iron with a sound loud enough to rouse them, he put his hand to the grate and gave it a shake.

  The door swung open at his touch.

  The Burley Man pushed it open and stepped inside. He could dimly make out the great bulk of the stone sarcophagus in the centre of the room, but the rest of the chamber remained steeped in darkness. He could not see into the corners, but a heavy stillness lay all about and the air reeked with the sickly pungent sweet stench of death.

  Pressing the back of his hand to his nose, Dex turned and fled the room. What are we doing in this awful place anyway, he wondered. What’s the point?

  Back outside, he sucked in clean air, then went to the equipment room to crank the generator to life and switch on the lights. He paused at the mess tent to dip the hem of his kaftan in some vinegar, then returned to the tomb. This time, with the lights on and the vinegar-soaked material over his mouth and nose, he confirmed what he feared: the captives were gone.

  Spinning on his heel, he ran back up the stairs and out into the wadi, shouting, “The prisoners have escaped!”

  Con and Mal were still in the bunk tent and seemed unimpressed with this news. “Pipe down, will you?” muttered Mal, a hand to his head. “It’s too early to be yelling like that.”

  “What’re you on about?” asked Con.

  “The prisoners aren’t in the cell. They’re gone. They must have escaped somehow.”

  “You sure?” Mal regarded him with suspicion.

  “Of course, I’m sure. Idiot!”

  “Okay, okay, keep your shirt on.”

  “What about the other two?” asked Con. “They still there?”

  “Which other two?”

  “The dead ones. Who do you think?”

  “Yeah, they’re still there.”

  “They still dead?” wondered Mal.

  “Shut up,” snarled Dex. “I’m warning you.”

  “They can’t have got far,” Con said. “We’ll find ’em.”

  “You better hope so—and before Tav gets back. He won’t like this.”

  The three trooped out into the canyon.

  “I’ll get Baby,” said Con. “Maybe she can track them down.”

  “I doubt it,” said Dex. “Leave her. Go get the guns instead. Those two yobs don’t know their way around the wadi, so we should still be able to catch them before they work out how to get out of here.”

  Armed and keen to recover their charges, the three Burley Men set off to work their way along the two main branches of the dry ravine. “Mal, you check out the back way,” ordered Dex. “And, Con—you come with me. We’ll take the big wadi.” The other stood looking at him. “Well? Let’s get cracking.”

  Mal turned and soon disappeared along the winding path that was the canyon bottom. Dex and Con made their way towards its mouth, moving quickly, senses alert to any stray sight or sound. They passed the burial niches of a former age and civilisation, quickly searching those large enough to hide a fugitive or two.

  After walking at least halfway to the end, they stopped to reassess the chase. “Maybe they went up over the top,” suggested Con. “If they’d have come this way, we would have picked up some trace of them by now.”

  “Could be you’re right,” agreed Dex. “And we would have heard Mal’s signal if he’d found anything. Let’s go back. There’s a cutting back there at the bend. We can climb up that way and have a good look ’round.”

  The two retraced their steps, following th
e undulating gorge back towards the camp. At the bend—a great curving bank of mottled sandstone—the wadi made a lazy quarter-circle from southwest to a more northerly direction. A deep natural crevice in the rock face had been widened by the tomb builders at some time in the past, and shallow steps were cut in the stone to form a crude staircase leading up out of the wadi to the plateau above. The two scrambled up the crease, eventually gaining the top. Whatever they hoped to glimpse from that high vantage, they did not see.

  A quick scan of the surrounding area revealed only the drearily unchanging landscape: sun-blasted rocks and shattered hills stretching into the heat-dazzled distance in every direction. Of the fugitives there was neither sign nor trace. Still, they waited awhile, shielding their eyes from the sun, surveying the empty, dun-coloured landscape for any sign of movement—any sign of life at all.

  There was nothing.

  “Now what?” Con wanted to know. He wiped the sweat from his face. “If they were anywhere around we’d have seen ’em from up here.”

  “We should get back to camp,” Dex said. “Tav will return soon. We’ll have to give him the bad news.”

  “Burleigh ain’t going to be happy,” Con observed.

  “No. He won’t be happy.”

  “It ain’t our fault.”

  Dex shrugged.

  “It ain’t,” Con insisted.

  “You tell him that. You get on so well with him. He listens to you, right? You can tell him how it wasn’t our fault the prisoners let themselves out while we were asleep.”

  Con muttered an oath under his breath.

  “Let’s get back.” Dex started for the rock-cut staircase leading down to the wadi floor.

  “What’s so almighty important about those two anyway?” Con asked, growing sullen. “They didn’t look like no threat to me. Pretty near hopeless, in fact.”