At dusk of the spilled blood
That went to the making of the wild sky
Between the snowflakes, she felt the hot splashes of blood on her face, opening her eyes at the deafening blast, Buddug's hands still around her throat but no grip in them any more.
And Buddug, no head to speak of most of it in fragments down the front of Bethan's torn once-white raincoat.
Part Ten
NOS DA
Chapter LXXV
The other side of midnight people began to emerge from their homes in coats and scarves, carrying lamps and torches, all very muted, hardly saying a word to each other. Like survivors of some bombing raid, Mair Huws, from the Post Office, and Eirlys Hywels silently helped Bethan take off what remained of the raincoat and wrapped her in an old tapestry cape, leaving the bloody mac draped over the bridge, dripping into the river.
Aled was crouching alone just inside the alley between the inn and the sub-station where the wind could not reach him. By the light of his torch, propped up against a brick, he was slipping another cartridge into his shotgun.
"What are you looking at?" He stood up and pointed the twelve-bore vaguely around him. In fact, nobody was looking at him except Berry Morelli, smoking a cigarette, one sleeve of his flying jacket flapping empty.
"Well, Aled. What can I say? You blew her head off. Dump the gun now?"
Aled shook his head. "To the rectory I have to go."
"Hey now, Aled," Berry said. "Think about this. Just take—"
"What is there to think about?" Standing with the gun hanging loose in his limp hands, white hair bedraggled. Aled put on a stark smile. "Mass-murderer I am now, isn't it?"
"When we explain to the cops—" Berry said, but Aled shook his head.
"Explain. Explain this?" He chuckled sourly. "Where do you begin? No, what I am doing is giving you an easy explanation, isn't it?"
Berry said, "Grief-stricken madman goes on the rampage with shotgun."
Aled smiled ruefully. "You are a little ahead of me, boy."
Berry looked at the little white-haired mass-killer and saw some kind of flawed hero.
"Go on, you bugger," Aled said. "Leave me be. Go to your woman."
"Why'd you do all this, Aled? There's nothing gonna bring her back."
Aled said. "Listen man, an accident. I have no reason to think otherwise. I blame no one for that. I—" He patted his jacket pocket, spare cartridges rattled. "I don't want the third degree, Morelli. Don't know why I turned away. Been coming on a long time probably."
"One more question, OK?"
Aled sighed. "I ought to shoot you as well, you nosy bugger."
"The tomb. Unless Glyndwr had curly horns—"
"Morelli, it never mattered what was in that tomb. The Gorsedd Ddu has always looked after this place, long before Glyndwr. Y Groesfan, the crossing place, where the warriors and heroes and the men of magic came to die. People have lived here half-aware of this for centuries. What they brought back, the four, was — I don't know — the spirit of Glyndwr, isn't it? Or something. How do you say it in English — the essence?"
Which they corrupted, Berry thought. They took the magic, and they wove that into the tapestry of this place. He thought of what he and Bethan had learned in the library over at Hereford yesterday. The impression they'd formed of the latter Druids as purveyors of a degraded version of the Celtic religion.
This was the tradition continued by the Gorsedd Ddu.
"Can of worms," Berry said, thinking of graveyard worms, grown fat on the dead. "How could folks live with all that?"
"Ah, Morelli, you will never understand. It's powerful, see. It works. What else in Wales is truly powerful these days, other than our traditions?" Aled's top teeth vanished into his snowy moustache. "Excuse me, I am going to take the air."
"No way I can talk you out of this?"
"Not unless you have a bigger gun," Aled said. Berry watched him walk away across the bridge into the snow.
He discovered Bethan was at his elbow, wrapped in some kind of Welsh rug.
"He's gone to kill ap Siencyn." Berry said. "I don't see him coming back."
She gripped his only visible arm.
"No," Berry said. "He knows where he's at. I think."
"Just goes on, doesn't it?" Her voice was hoarse and fractured; she kept massaging her throat. "On and on."
"Something ended here tonight. You must feel that."
"Nothing truly ends with guns," Bethan said.
Berry shrugged, which hurt his broken arm. "How do you feel now?"
"How do I look?"
Bruises besmirched most of her face. The skin was purple and swollen around both eyes. Her lip was twisted and her cheeks blotched with blood, some of it her own.
"You look wonderful," he said.
"Your poor arm. Is it very painful?"
"Not like in the church. Christ, I don't think I ever felt more — you know — than when I was lying with both arms jammed in the Goddam tomb and there's this candle drifting towards me across—"
Bethan looked up sharply.
"Don't panic," Berry said. "It was Aled. The dissident. His, ah, wife died."
"Gwenllian?"
"Accident in Aber. What pushed him over the edge, I guess. Sign that when something goes real bad, it ceases to discriminate between the English and the Welsh."
"Or traitors and the cowards," Bethan said.
"I liked him. Whatever happened here tonight, whatever lifted, it was in some way all down to him. Not me or you. He did it."
He licked his forefinger and rubbed a blood-fleck off her nose. "What happens in the church, Aled puts down the candle and he levers up the slab so I can get my arms out and then we kick the slab clean off the tomb and smash the shit outta the fucking effigy. He does most of that, I'm hurting too much."
Bethan said slowly. "So you know now what was in the tomb."
"Yeah."
"Do I have to ask?"
"Bones," Berry said. "Bones. Like you'd expect. Only not what you'd expect. Soon as the air got inside they more or less crumbled away. But. yeah, we saw what it was."
"And?"
"Aled figured it for a ram."
"A ram? As in… sheep?"
"Yeah. Make what you want outta that. Me, I don't want to think too hard about it. I lost enough sleep already."
The rotors of the police helicopter were heard, a distant drone and then a clatter. And with the clatter a searchlight beam swept the village.
"Best place to land, I think." Chief Inspector Gwyn Arthur Jones said, "is the school playground. What do you think, Neil?"
Sergeant Neil Probert only grunted. Flying at night through intermittent snow, he'd been terrified most of the way. Even the pilot did not look exactly happy. He'd made them wait an hour until the snow had eased, before deciding it was safe to make the trip at all.
Neil had not spoken since the searchlight had picked up the Daihatsu on its side at the bottom of a gulley, and Gwyn Arthur had ordered the pilot to go in low enough to ascertain that they were both dead, the two men who'd been flung out into the snow. They could not have been anything but dead.
"Tell you one thing, Guv," said the pilot now. a Cockney called Bob Gomer. "You won't catch me doing this number again."
"Ah, worst of it is over, man," Gwyn Arthur said, scornfully. "Right now, come on, let's go round the village once again before we land."