Chapter LXXIII
They would come for him in time, he knew that.
It was not dark. The light from the sky leaked in from the long window, crimson.
He was too weary now to endure the pain of struggle, wanting to lay his head down on the tomb in exhaustion. But the only part of the tomb his head could reach was the head of the effigy, his eyes looking into its eyes, its lips… He turned away in revulsion and the movement dragged on his trapped arm and the pain made his whole body blaze.
He'd looked and felt around for something to wedge under the slab, next to his arm. Something he could lean on, hard enough perhaps to make some space to pull the arm out.
But Dai had taken away the jack and both crowbars and then Robin's flying jacket which Berry had hung over the rood screen while they worked on the tomb.
"Scumbag!" he screamed, and the walls threw it back at him with scorn."… bag, ag, ag."
The stone knight shifted, settled on Berry's arm; he thought he could hear his bones splintering, getting ground into powder. From the other side of the church wall, he heard the movement in the snow which he'd earlier assumed was Idwal Pugh.
"Idwal! Help me, willya!"
The cry was out before he could stop it.
No way could it be Idwal out there. No way could it have been Idwal first time around, when he and Dai were busy with the crowbars. Idwal had been dismissed or was dead or was a party to the betrayal.
Which was not a betrayal of him so much as of Bethan.
Was there anybody left in these parts who had not at some time betrayed Bethan?
He wept for Bethan and because of the pain, because he was trapped. Because, sooner or later, they were going to come for him.
Bethan looked up into the split veins and the venom. Black eyes and yellow, twisted teeth.
"Gwrach" Bethan spat.
Buddug did not move at first, but something leapt behind her black pebble eyes. And then her enormous turkey killer's hands came up with incredible speed and lifted Bethan off her feet and hurled her into the church wall.
Bethan's head cracked against the stone and bounced off and Buddug whirled and brutally slapped her, with bewildering force, across the face so that her head spun away so hard and so fast she thought her neck was breaking.
"The first thing we learn at school," Buddug said, not even panting with the exertion, "is to be polite to our elders."
Bethan fell in a heap to the soft snow and sat there half-stunned, her back to the wall, feeling the blood running freely from her nose or her mouth. Her glasses had gone.
"And the next thing we learn—" Buddug bent down and dragged her to her feet, tearing her white mac at the shoulders " — is to stand up when we are spoken to."
Bethan lolled, feeling her eyes glazing.
"Don't you go to sleep!" Buddug hit her again with a hand that felt as sharp and heavy as a wood-axe.
Buddug hissed, "You killed our baby."
Bethan tried to speak. Saw Buddug's hand raised again and shrank back against the wall.
"We like them to be pure-bred if possible," Buddug said. "Dilwyn's was a mistake. The child has to work harder, see, because of its mother."
"You're sick," Bethan whispered through swollen lips. "Go on, hit me again. What more can you do?"
"Idwal!" They heard from inside the church, a weak and despairing cry. "Help me, willya!"
Bethan's heart sagged in her limp body. Buddug's lumpen features cracked with glee. Do you love him?"
Bethan desperately shook her head.
"You will not miss him, then, when he is gone. They will leave him tonight to see how much he can do to himself and then, in the morning—"
Bethan rocked her head from side to side to shut this out.
Buddug pinched Bethan's cheeks together to make her look at her. "And then, in the morning —
"What are they doing to him?"
"No matter," Buddug said, ignoring the question. "He will be long gone by then. He will know that soon."
The knight smiled a victor's smile with reddened lips.
From outside Berry heard the sound of scuffling, heard talking in Welsh, a voice cry out in pain.
He recognised the voice at once.
"Bastard!" Berry screamed at the Goddamn knight, his control gone. "Motherfucker!" All the words that had seemed so pathetic, still seemed pathetic.
He pushed the fingers of his left hand as far as they would go into the gap between the slab and the walls of the tomb, jammed the arm in so that both arms were parallel under the knight's dead weight.
He waited two minutes like that, conserving his strength, then he wrenched hard on the trapped arm and simultaneously heaved upwards with the good left arm.
The knight shifted and he felt an appalling weight on the left arm. The good arm.
He cried to the rafters in his agony and passed out with the pain.
When the long, bitter cry came through the church wall, Bethan pushed Buddug aside and made a rush for the corner of the building and the doorway.
Or intended to.
She'd moved less than a couple of feet when one of Buddug's great hands caught her by the throat and squeezed on her windpipe. She is going to kill me, Bethan thought. Like the ducks, like the chickens in the farmyard.
"We do not walk away when we are being spoken to," Buddug said and squeezed harder.
All was quiet within the church.
"Will not be long, now," Buddug said.
"Why are you doing this?"
"Do not make yourself ridiculous," Buddug said.
Bethan thought of the Gorsedd Ddu, who judged the traitors and the cowards.
She thought, we must hear each other's agony and hopelessness before we die.
"Dewch" Buddug said, taking Bethan's arm. Come.
"No."
With little effort, Buddug twisted the arm until Bethan gritting her teeth, felt the bones begin to crack.
Sobbing, she nodded and Buddug propelled her across the churchyard to the top of the steps.
A meagre light appeared.
He opened his eyes and saw both arms under the stone and there was no pain now, but he could not move at all.
And beyond the chapel, visible through the lattice of the rood screen, the little light, like a taper.
The light did not move. It seemed to cast no ambience. Like the light through a keyhole, something on the other side of the dark.
Berry felt no pain, only sorrow and profound misery.
Chapter LXXIV
When the blizzard eased a little, Guto and Alun left the Range Rover with its nose in the snowdrift and walked away in different directions.
Alun's mission was to climb to the top of the nearest hill with his mobile phone to see if he could get a signal and, if he could, to send for the police. And the ambulance.
Which was too late now, anyway. Snow matting his beard and freezing there, coming over the tops of his Wellingtons with every step, Guto looked down on the Range Rover.
Left with its sidelights on and its engine running to keep the heater going, quite pointlessly, for Miranda Moore-Lacey.
Guto didn't have a mission other than to walk. He should have stayed in the heat, laid Miranda's body out in the snow. At the thought of this, he rammed his hands bitterly down into the pockets of his presentable Parliamentary candidate's overcoat and ploughed on.
Years since he'd walked the Nearly Mountains, and that had been in decent weather, he hadn't the faintest idea where the hell he was.
However, reaching the crest of a ridge he found he was looking back towards Y Groes where the sky still was streaked with this unhealthy red, shining out like the bars of an electric fire in a darkened room. An electric fire in the dark always conveyed a sense of illness to Guto; his mam used to leave one in his bedroom when he was sick. Years ago this was, but the impression remained.