Mortal Love (32 page)

“
Ragresek brathky,
” a voice shouted. Panting, Radborne looked over his shoulder but still saw no one.

The voice came again, so close his ears rang. “
Ragresek brathky!
”

Radborne threw himself to the ground, rolling a few yards downhill. Flints and gorse tore at him before he came to a stop beside a patch of heather, a few blossoms still clinging to it. He turned onto his stomach and lay as flat as he could, staring up at the moor.

Down the slope came a small procession. Four horses pacing one behind the other, gray and white, their sides flecked with flies and burrs. Each bore a rider: three men, one woman. From where he lay, he could not clearly see their faces. Probably they were tinkers. Their clothes were worn and slightly archaic—hoodless capes and heavy leather brogans, pale-gray scarves wrapped 'round and 'round the woman's neck. The men were tall. Their coloring was dark, and they had long dark hair bound back from their foreheads. One had a roughly trimmed beard and mustache. As the horses drew nearer, Radborne got a better glimpse of the woman, also tall and broad-shouldered, with red-brown hair.

Almost he cried her name aloud. Before he could, the horse cantered past, its hooves striking sparks from granite and crushed flint. The three men followed. The smell of them filled the air like smoke. Ripe warmth of horses and unwashed hair, sea salt and oiled leather, and, strongest of all, a sharp green scent like sap.

The odor was so powerful that Radborne winced and rubbed his nose. As he did, the last man turned suddenly and stared at him through the twilight. He raised his hand, pointed at Radborne, and called out in a ringing voice words Radborne could not understand.

With a muffled curse, he pressed himself against the ground. The man drew back the reins of his horse, and, for a terrified moment, Radborne thought he would dismount. Instead the man leaned down from his saddle and grabbed a handful of earth. Ahead of him the others continued, unknowing. Before Radborne could move, the man flung the earth at him.

An explosion of grit and loose soil struck Radborne's face. He shouted with pain, his eyes burning as though doused with turpentine.

“
Jesus! Jesus, stop!
”

Around him was a flurry as of grouse beating into the air. He wiped desperately at his eyes, yanking his shirt free and rubbing his face until the dirt was gone. When he opened his eyes, the world was smeared with red. After a minute he could see again.

Through slitted eyes he stared back at the moor. Far, far away, on the northwestern horizon, four small figures rose and fell as though borne on the sea. Ahead of them, smaller still, a black speck raced until it was swallowed by the sky. Radborne waited until all were gone from view, then stood.

The sun was a gold sliver barely visible above the black-and-violet rim of sea. Radborne blinked and ran a hand across his forehead. Bits of dirt still clung there; he flicked them away and started toward the top of the rise. He had gotten only a few yards when he saw something on the ground. With a frown he stooped to investigate.

Nestled within a circle of etiolated gray toadstools was a tiny bier made of twigs, its bed woven of dried grass and the stems of beech leaves. It was no longer than his hand. The bottom was covered with brownish tufts of cattail fluff and soft green moss, like a phoebe's nest. On top of it lay another bit of soft brown stuff.

It was a dead bird. Its wingtips were striated with brown and white, its breast speckled with deeper brown. It had a curved gray beak like a thorn, and eyes shuttered by minute gray lids like poppy seeds. When he cupped his palms around it, bird and bier were all but weightless. He picked it up and held it tenderly, wondering what it was, where it had come from. Already he had forgotten the tinkers. He stood, shading his eyes as he gazed into the gold-flecked sky, a haze like smoke blowing from the east, and began to walk back to Sarsinmoor.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Disenchantment of Bottom

H
e walked back to Camden Town.
It took Daniel hours, going down every side alley he saw, entering every pub and café and gallery in North Islington, following every auburn-haired woman (or man) until s/he turned and Daniel saw—a dozen times, twenty, a hundred—that it was not her. Too late he thought of what he should have done from the very first and ran panting until he reached the canal path, looking in vain for the narrow boat.

It was nowhere to be seen. But there was the arched bridge, there the willow tree, its fallen leaves forming runic patterns as they drifted on black water. Daniel paused, trying to catch his breath, then ran up to an elderly woman walking her sheltie.

“
Cooksferry Queen,”
he gasped. “It's one of the narrow boats. Do you know where it is?”

“Sorry.” She shook her head, concern in her mild eyes. “I've never seen a canal boat here. Little Venice, or there at Camden Lock. You all right, dear? Are you lost?”

“No.”

He turned and walked, slowly now, down the towpath toward Camden Town. The blisters on his mouth no longer hurt, though his skin itched as if he had a sunburn starting to peel. At Monarch Wines he stopped, went inside, and bought a bottle of Hill's absinthe, then continued on toward Chalk Farm Road, brown-bagging it.

By the time he neared Nick's flat, the bottle was half empty. His lips no longer hurt; indeed, they seemed amazingly to have healed, the blistered skin smoothed away beneath a sticky, licorice-scented film. There was a buzzing in his ears like a fluorescent bulb. Above him, behind the scrim of late-Victorian buildings and the shining curve of the new Ice Wharf complex, the sky had taken on the satanic emerald glow of vaseline glass.

“‘How lush and lusty it looks,'” he said as a pair of teenage girls stared at him with contempt. “‘How green.'”

“Fucking shitehead,” one said, and spit at him as he lurched past.

“‘I think I will carry this island home in my pocket and eat it like an apple,'” he shouted back at them. “‘And sowing the kernels of it in the sea bring forth more islands.'”

He began to run down the High Street, and everywhere people looked at him sideways through cold, white, malignant eyes. “The Beautiful One is here,” he said, and doubled over to vomit on the sidewalk. “Oh, fuck.”

He was losing it.

He would not lose her.

He couldn't bring
himself to go back up to the flat, not yet. He drank some bottled electrolyte solution from Holland and Barrett and felt better. He could hold the image of Larkin Meade's face in his mind for almost a minute now, without being overcome by a desolation so intense it felt like terror. Perversely, the infusion of absinthe focused his mind less on Larkin's physical presence—her voice, the taste of her skin—than upon the question of who she really was.

A fringe artist who'd been collected by Russell Learmont? A fringe person, more likely, but what did that mean? He stood on the High Street and stared up at the sign on Nick's building. His thoughts unspooled the way they did when he was researching a profile of a performer dead too soon or too late, with nothing to go on but the memories of bemused onlookers.
No one ever took him seriously. She always was fine once she got onstage. He told me it was over between them but … Who knew she'd be capable of this?
Secondary sources, not completely useless but unreliable, and never as good as—

Of a sudden Juda Trent's words came back to him—
She is a primary source
—and with them the memory of that garbled name.

Not
Beth
or
Bleth;
not English but Welsh.

Blodeuedd.

“Shit.” He shoved the absinthe bottle alongside a trash bin.

His notes were in his laptop up in Nick's spare room, along with his reference books, de Rougemont and a Schopenhauer compendium, volumes dealing with the Tristan mythos. Nothing Welsh, though. And it was too late for the British Library.

But Waterstone's was just down the road, and they stayed open till eight.

He hurried down the street and into the bookstore, then downstairs to the section on folklore and world mythology. He scanned the titles until he found what he wanted, stuck between copies of
From Ritual to Romance
and
The Owl Service:
a pocket-size Everyman edition of
The Mabinogion.

“Right,” whispered Daniel.

He flipped through until he came to the Fourth Branch, “Math Son of Mathonwy.”

With her lover she murdered her husband, Llew, but Gwydion found Llew's decaying corpse and brought his bones to life, then changed Blodeuedd into a bird. Blodeuedd, Flowers, became Blodeuwedd, Flower-Face: the owl.

“Hoot,” said someone beside Daniel. It was Nick. “You win the prize.”

Daniel stared at him coldly.

“I saw you through the window. I was looking for you, Daniel. I was worried.”

“Yeah? You should've been worried two nights ago at Sira's.”

“I know, I know.” Nick stared at his hands, raw lines scabbed with blood. “Look, I don't know how many times I can say this, but I'm sorry, Danny, I'm fucking sorrier than I have ever been about almost anything.”

“Why did you do it, then?” Daniel said. “Why? You were my
friend.
…”

“I know.” Daniel looked over to see his friend's topaz eyes dark with pain. “Come on, lad, let's go.”

Daniel hesitated, then slid the book back on the shelf. Nick looked Daniel up and down, and his expression softened. “You stayed with her. Oh, Danny.”

“I need to find her. Do you have her phone number? Or—”

“Danny. She's gone.” He pointed at Daniel's bruised throat. “That's as good as it gets, lad. Let her go.” He glanced at the bookshelf, then murmured, “‘We make her owls but she wants to be flowers.' Or is it the other way around? You remember,” he said, and pointed at
The Owl Service.
“Although I don't think our Larkin wants to be owls
or
flowers.”

“What does she want, then?”

“She wants to go home.” Nick shook his head sadly. “She wants to be whole. You and me, Danny? We're the things her wings touch when she flies by. She will never come back to us. Not ever.”

They started upstairs. For a minute Daniel said nothing. Then, “You saw her a second time. Sira told me. In Prague.”

Nick hurried ahead of him, out onto the street. “I did. And it almost killed me.
She
almost killed me.”

“Do you mean she tried to murder you?”

“I mean she can't touch us without destroying us. It's like lightning striking twice. That's when I started putting it all together.”

“How?”

“Because she wasn't the same person. I thought she was, I wanted her to be—but she wasn't. She was dead, Danny.” Nick's voice faltered; he stared straight ahead, his eyes unfocused. “Rob told me. A fire in her flat in Lambeth. I'd forgotten about her by then; or no, not forgotten, just put her away. Refused to think of her. A triumph, when a day finally went by and I realized I hadn't thought of her at all.

“I was in Prague, just kicking around. A few gigs, and I decided to stay on for a bit. I saw her in a café. It was her—I knew it was her soon as I laid eyes on her—but she was different. I mean, she
looked
different, but I knew. I could tell. And when I went with her …”

He shuddered, turned and held his hand out so Daniel could see it shaking uncontrollably. “Like that.
She wasn't dead.
Whatever the fuck she was, whatever she is—she's not like us, Danny.”

He looked up. Daniel swallowed. “Then … why? why did you …”

His voice died, and Nick nodded. “Same reason you are.

“The first time was different. We'd met, and I … I started seeing her. She had some songs—ballads, twelfth-, thirteenth-century troubadour stuff. Amazing material, I have no idea how she came by it. Just about crumbled in my hands. It was only after she left that I started writing anything worthwhile. I did the first drafts of
Human Bomb
back then.”

“Troubadours?”

“I guess that's your territory with Tristan, right?”

“And she had actual manuscripts? These ballads?”

“Yeah. But they're gone now—I mean, if you wanted to use them for your book. They really did just crumble one day. I was thinking of giving them to the BM or something; it seemed kind of criminal for a nob like me to have them. But after she left, they just sort of fell to bits. Like me,” he added. “And you.

“She had all kinds of things, Danny. An absolutely beautiful, absolutely perfect manuscript of some ancient Irish poem—like something from the Book of fucking Kells, it was. Not the kind of thing you keep in a doss in Lambeth.”

“How'd she get them?”

“She always told me people gave them to her—or no, what she used to say was that they belonged to her. She said someone had stolen all her things, and she had just a few of them left. All these precious books and manuscripts. Drawings, too. Paintings.”

Daniel rubbed his arms, his flesh prickling. “Is she … do you think she's some kind of kleptomaniac?”

“She'd have to be a goddamn brilliant one to get all this stuff and keep hold of it. A regular master thief. No. I think it's more like what I said, people gave her things. Like tribute.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “Like me: all those songs on
Human Bomb
were dedicated to her.”

“I never knew that till Sira told me.”

“How would you? Never said so in the liner notes, but they were. Fucking off my nut, I was, too. Best songs I ever wrote, don't think I don't know that. There were other songs, stuff I recorded but never got released.”

“I never knew any of this. What are they like?”

“Oh, you know. Ballads. ‘Songs in the style of.' That manuscript she had, the Irish one—I don't know if she nicked it or what, but it was incredible. You know the Yellow Book of Lecan?”

Daniel shook his head.

“It's like the Book of the Dun Cow. Old Irish sagas and poems. There's a famous Irish story called ‘The Wooing of Etain'—what's-her-name did a version of, Lady Gregory. The other one, too—Oscar's ma. Lady Wilde. This is the kind of stuff you know if you're the Dread Legendary Folksinger. But for all these thousand years there were just fragments, until a full version was discovered up in Cheltenham, back in the 1930s, tucked in with the Yellow Book of Lecan.

“But see this, Danny—our girl, our Larkin,
she
had a copy of it! Gorgeous illuminated manuscript … like a dream, it was. I could not fucking believe it. To hold that in my hands, the entire story—like
that
—it was incredible. One of the greatest moments of my life.”

“Could you read it? Wasn't it in Gaelic?”

“Oh, it was in Irish, all right. And no, I can't. But
she
could. Even considering the fact that it was hard to figure out where the letters ended and the pictures began—she could read it. Like the funnies, Danny.”

He stared at Daniel, his eyes glistening. “Ha, ha.”

“Ha, ha,” said Daniel, and looked away.

They had reached the corner by the World's End. The traffic light was red. Daniel stood, mulling over all Nick had told him. “What's the story about?” he said at last. “Who's Etain?”

“The second wife of Midhir; one of the de Danaan. Midhir's other wife was jealous of her, so she turned Etain into a butterfly, then sent a storm to blow her out of Tir Na Nog and into the land of men. Etain fluttered about wretchedly for seven years; then she fell into a cup of wine and was swallowed by another queen. Nine months later this woman gave birth to a second Etain, just as beautiful as the first, and when this Etain grew up, she was wed to a mortal king. It ends with Etain's mortal husband so raving mad he declares war on the Tuatha de Danaan and nearly destroys all of Tir Na Nog. So now even the Land of the Blest has been laid waste, and for what? A
girl,
Danny. The moral of the story is, she ain't worth it, Danny. How could she be worth it?”

Daniel looked across the street. The light had changed several times, and they still hadn't moved. “If Larkin was here right now,” he said slowly, “I mean right this minute—if she was to walk up to you right now and stand here in the street with me right next to you and ask you to—would you go with her?”

“In a heartbeat.”

The light flashed green; they walked. As they stepped onto the opposite curb, Nick began to sing in a low voice.

Daniel gave him a wistful smile. “Is that one of the songs you wrote for her?”

“No. That's from the manuscript. It's gone now,” Nick said sadly. “Turned to dust in my hands, like that.”

He looked up, his expression tormented, and gestured helplessly. “Like everything she gave me. All I had left was what was in here.”

He tapped his head, then made a face. “And the scars, too, of course.
Don't say I never gave you nuffink, Nicky!”
he cried in a shrill voice, and laughed. “Ah, well. Probably best thing that ever happened to me. I did
Human Bomb
and met Sira and lived happily ever after. End of story.”