Lower lip jutting like a waterspout.
Gargoyle.
Giles mentally measured the distance to the car. Fifteen yards. Might as well have been a mile. Not a hope of making it.
Through the blinding downpour, he sized up the opposition. They were both shorter than he was, but the crater-faced one had a rugby player's physique, wide chest, arms like double-barrelled sawn-off shotguns.
"Look, lads. " he said weakly, accepting beyond doubt that he was in deep trouble here. What could one say to people like this?
Rain coming down like nails. Giles was suddenly terribly frightened. And heartsick to think this should happen to him in the land he'd chosen for his own, for his unborn children.
He wanted to weep.
The dark one, Slit-mouth, hard water plastering down his sparse black hair, pouring like furious tears down his concrete face, said, "You're dead, you are, fuckin' Saxon git."
Giles folded in two as a big shoe went into his stomach and his hair was torn back and something that could only have been a fist but felt like a steel spike was driven into his left eye.
Chapter XXXII
In Y Groes, around midnight, the air was still.
All that night there would be violent rain in Pontmeurig. Over the Nearly Mountains there was sleet. The River Meurig was savagely swollen.
Y Groes, around midnight, was another world.
True, it had been stormy and the barometers still registered minimal pressure. But now the rain had stopped and the wind had died. The clouds slid back theatrically and there was a full moon over the church. Wherever you stood in Y Groes, the moon always seemed to be over the church, like a white candle flame.
Just before midnight, Claire came down the ribbon of lane from the church among a group of people. They included the rector, the Reverend Elias Ap Siencyn, Glyn Harri,
the amateur historian, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis, mother of Dilwyn and grandmother of Sali. And the Morgans— Buddug Morgan and big Morgan Morgan.
They walked down towards the river and Claire, seeing the moon on the thrashing water, became excited.
The river had been rising all day and something in Claire had been rising with it. She felt drawn to the water, but a gentle hand held her back.
"Dim nawr."
Not now.
Mrs. Bronwen Dafis explained that if she went down now she might not get back. It was too dangerous. Too dark.
But the moon…
Indeed, Mrs. Dafis said cryptically. The moon.
"Wel, pryd?" Claire said. When?
"Bore fori," the rector said quietly. Tomorrow morning.
He turned and walked away up the hill.
Tacitly dismissed, the group split up in silence. Glyn Harri followed at a respectful distance behind the spindly figure of the rector. Then went Buddug and Morgan. Mrs. Bronwen Dafis was the last, a tiny upright figure, alone. None of them looked back at Claire, who stood staring into the dark water.
The river was still gathering rage, although there was no wind or rain here. As if driven by the moon, it hurled itself at the stone buttresses of the bridge.
No lights now in the village, except for a lone streetlamp with a small yellow bulb under a pan-lid shade. The rector's long shape vanished beyond the light.
She was alone on the bridge, but unafraid. Inside her dwelt a great calm which stilled her thoughts and her emotions. She was content. She was here. Home.
At last.
Time passed. True darkness came, as a dense cloud formed around the moon and then a final fold of cloud came down over it like an eyelid. The air was still, but the water rushed and roared, filling the atmosphere with rhythmic sounds. Claire could hear the night now and feel its essence inside her.
Eventually, she began to walk away from the bridge and up the hill towards the church. Although she was moving further from the bridge, further from the water, the sounds were going with her, swirling around her and then separating, dying off, then wafting in. And mingled with the water noise was the sound of singing, uneven and hesitant. A frail organ wail, like cat cries, and the sonorous rhythm of measured footsteps.
An arm brushed against Claire and a hand touched her shoulder.
Misty people were drifting around her. She was carried among them up the hill.
And they sang. With uncertainty in their fractured, mournful voices, they sang, in Welsh and then in English,
Love is kind and suffers long
Love is meek and thinks no wrong
The amorphous crowd split in two and something long and narrow slid between the two lines and a darker mist closed around it.
As the singing fell away and the people dissolved into vapour, Claire felt a momentary heart-stab of pain. But a cushion of warm air settled around her and the pain became a soft and bearable memory. With no light to guide her, she turned into the track leading to her cottage.
Soon after, the rain returned. But there was no wind until daylight came.
Chapter XXXIII
It was probably the cold water that deadened the pain. He was lying in a puddle. Or perhaps it had been raining so hard that the entire car park was a great lake.
A blow. He heard rather than felt it.
Bastards. He cringed. How long would they go on hitting him and kicking him before he lost consciousness? He lay very still; perhaps he should pretend he was already unconscious. Perhaps that would stop them. no need for you to speak Welsh, man…
How friendly they were in Y Groes. How hospitable. makes you a novelty, like, isn't it…
A Rhys. He was a Rhys. Sort of. In spirit.
He was with them.
His head imploding as they kicked it. Far away though, now. He closed his eyes, wished he could keep them closed for ever, feeling nothing but the icy balm.
But they wrenched him to his feet again, flung him back against the wall. His stomach clenched, waiting for the pain. He felt the vomit rising again.
White figure swimming towards him.
From the picture. Pale figure from the photograph in its frame in the judge's study. Eisteddfod Genedlaethol White-robed, bardic, druidic.
It shimmered.
"No," he said weakly. "No. "
"Giles."
"No."
Bethan pushed back the hood of her white raincoat. "Giles, can you see me?"
"No," he said. "No. Get away from me."
"Got him, have you? Where's the other?"
"Don't… know. Keep still, you bugger. You bite me again, I'm going to break your nose. What should I do with this one?"
"What you should do is to get rid of him very discreetly before he sees your face. You have enough problems as it is."
"Big bloody help that is. Where am I going to put him?"
"Well, hell. I don't know — drag him over to the castle and throw him in the moat. Take him a good while to extricate himself, by which time we'll all be away."
Guto looked puzzled. There is no moat anymore."
Dai Death looked up into the plummeting night sky. "There will be by now," he said.
Giles stared at Bethan as if he didn't know whether to push her away or to hit her. As if he couldn't decide if it was really her. Or, if it was her, whose side she was on.
In the shelter of the eaves, he was propped into a corner like a broken scarecrow, fair hair spiked and bloody, his suit vomit-soaked, beer-soaked, puddle-soaked and torn in several places. But it was his eye Bethan was most worried about.
"Giles, can you see me now?"
"Yes. Yes, of course I can."
"Can you see me through both eyes?"