Thud-ud-ud.
Felt something crumble, give way.
He stopped. "Where's Bethan?"
"Outside, with Idwal, I should think. She didn't want to come in, either. Morelli…?"
"Yeah?"
"This thing with Bethan and you. Nothing serious there?"
"What's that mean?"
"You know what it means, man, you know the way it has been for her"
"Yeah." Berry hit the chisel again. They heard fragments of loose stone fall a few inches inside the tomb. A flat kind of chink as a piece struck something and did not bounce off, rather the substance it had fallen on simply crumbled.
Dust to dust.
The torchlight flickered.
"She's not for you, boy."
"You don't think so, huh?" Berry left the chisel jammed under the lid of the tomb. Dai fitted the end of one of the crowbars into what was now a half-inch gap alongside it.
The torchlight flickered.
Berry's eyes met the smooth, years-worn orbs of the knight's eyes.
They were open now. He knew those eyes were open.
"I think maybe we aren't gonna need the jack after all," Berry said.
Bethan said. "I've come to talk about trees."
Miss Rhys, the judge's granddaughter, was bolt upright in the judge's high-backed Gothic chair, her face made harsh by candlelight which ought to have softened it. Bethan stood on the old rug, where the dead Giles had lain, both feet on the dragon's head.
Claire said, '"My tree or yours?"
"You found your tree," Bethan said. "I want to find mine."
"Why?"
"I want to chop it down," Bethan said simply.
Claire Rhys looked at her with contempt.
"Well?" Bethan did not move.
"Have you asked Buddug?"
"If I had been five days in the desert, I wouldn't ask Buddug for a cup of water."
"Go away," Claire said. "Go and ask Buddug."
Bethan moved towards the desk, intending to knock a candlestick over in her face.
"Come any closer." Claire said calmly, "and I shall have to harm you."
Bethan stopped. The room had grown very cold, she thought, under the influence of its mistress's displeasure.
She said, "What have you become?"
Claire smiled. ""You never really met my grandfather, did you?"
Bethan said nothing.
"I've discovered, to my shame, that he was rather a weak man. He knew he had to return here, that he could not break the chain. So he left my grandmother and my mother in England and he came back. He came back alone."
Bethan was momentarily puzzled. Then she felt nearly ill.
"He ought, of course, to have brought them with him."
The village, Aled had said, demanded sacrifices.
"But he was weak, as I say. He left them and he returned alone."
… the old Druids, see, they did not sacrifice each other, their… you know, virgins, kids. None of that nonsense. But I've heard it said they used to sacrifice their enemies.
"You brought Giles as your little sacrifice," Bethan said, her voice like dust.
"And also atoned for Thomas Rhys," Claire said. "Don't forget that. I had to complete what he could not."
She meant her parents. She'd given her parents in sacrifice to Y Groes and to whatever lay in the tomb and whatever it represented.
He was only English, Sali Dafis had said.
"You were very stupid," Claire said. "You and your child could have belonged here. You could have lived in the warmth, at the heart of our heritage and watched it spread and grow and flourish like a lovely garden."
"Once the weeds had been killed," Bethan said.
"Your words."
"And Glyndwr will rise again, like the legends say, springing from his tomb with his army behind him to free Wales from the oppressor."
Miss Rhys spread her hands. "We are not naive. Glyndwr is dead and buried."
And then her voice rose, horribly close to Buddug-pitch.
"But the Bird is aloft. And Death walks the roads in his long coat. And the shit-breathed hag—Gwrach y rhybin—the hag is on the wing again."
Bethan turned away, almost choking.
They had both crowbars wedged under the lip of the tomb, the effigy on top slightly askew now.
The torch flickered.
Dai stood back. "I think we are there."
"How you figure we should play it? Slide it?"
"If we both get this end," Dai said, "we can lift it and then swing it to one side. Are you prepared then, Morelli?"
"For?"
"For whatever is… there. Spent most of my life with stiffs, see," Dai said. "You were a bit jumpy back at the depot, if I remember rightly "
"These are old bones. Old bones aren't the same."
Dai smiled, the torchlight glancing off his bald skull.
And you reckon it's old Owain Glyndwr in here? Well, tell me, Morelli, how will you know?"
"Be more obvious if it isn't."
"You mean if it's empty."
"Is what I mean." Berry stood at the head of the tomb, hands grasping the stone lip an inch or so from the eroded cheeks of the knight. "OK, Dai? We gonna count down from five and then lift and swing? Four, three, two, one—"
The torch went out.
Berry heard the grating thump of falling masonry. An icy, numbing pain bolted up his arm.
When the torch came on again, Dai was holding it. Berry looked down and couldn't see The end of his own left hand beyond the lip of the tomb, beyond the smirk of ages on the face of the knight. He was in agony, knew his wrist was broken, maybe his arm too. And, worse than that, he was trapped.
Dai was walking off into the nave. "I'm sorry, Morelli," he said over his shoulder. "But a man has to make sacrifices if he wants to retire to paradise."
It was all shatteringly clear to Bethan now.
"And Dilwyn's wife? A harmless little typist from the South-East?"
Miss Rhys stood up. "We've spoken enough, Bethan. Time you left, I think."
"It doesn't bear thinking about. How can you live with it?
"In comparison to what the English have done to the Welsh over the centuries, it's really rather a small thing, wouldn't you say? I should have thought that you, as a teacher—"
"But I don't have to live with it," Bethan said. "I can tell whoever I choose. Beginning with the police."
"Bethan, I used to be in journalism," Claire said wearily. I learned a lot about the police and the law. What it amounts to in this case is that the police don't believe in magic and, even if they did, no offences have been committed under the English legal system. Now go away and dwell upon your future."
When she calmly blew out both red candles, Bethan's nerve went; she scrabbled for the door handle and got out, feeling her way along the walls, through the hall, into the living room where the moon glanced off shiny things, and out into the blood-washed night.
She had to find Berry, get him away from that church, if Dai and Idwal had not persuaded him already to forget the fantasy of dislodging a tradition cemented through centuries.
She came out of the gateway, between the sycamores, looked up and down the country lane over the sweating snow. The Sprite was still parked where she'd left it. She looked in the back and saw that the hydraulic jack and crowbars were missing. Berry had gone to desecrate the tomb.
Trembling with anxiety, Bethan ran through the lych-gate into the circular graveyard where the atmosphere was close and clinging and the sky was low, red and juicy. She could see across the village — still no power down there, houses lit by glow-worms — to the Nearly Mountains, hard and bright with ice.
Bethan stopped and stiffened as a hand clawed her shoulder, spun her around.
Buddug seemed to tower over her, bulky in a dark duffel-coat, her big face as red as the sky.
"A question you have for me, is it, little bitch?"