Darkhenge Read Online Free PDF

up?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThis guru.”
    Rob shrugged. “Yes. His name’s Vetch.”
    Father Mac looked at him a moment in disbelief. “Vetch. Very green.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt’s the name of a plant. Better than Nettle, I suppose.” He snorted. “Or Hemlock.”
    Watching the heavy figure wave and walk off up the village lane, Rob thought of the red-haired girl’s wide, astounded eyes. Whatever Darkhenge meant, Vetch had spoken the word they had been longing for. They had crowded around the stranger, talking, questioning, demanding explanations, but he had said little else, smiling wanly and standing there swaying slightly, exhausted, as if at the end of some long journey. And all the time, even when the tribe escorted him toward their dilapidated tents and vans, he had looked beyond them at Rob. A secret look. As if they shared something.
    Glancing down at his hand, Rob flexed the fingers, feeling again the man’s wet, slippery grip. In the darkness he let himself think it.
    The man had changed shape. Swallow, hare, fish. And so had the woman hunting him.
    Wind stirred the trees, dripping spatters of rain, so he turned, and saw the lights were on in his mother’s bedroom. Against the rise of the downs the house was big and dark, holding all its sorrow tight, reclusive in its vast garden, and beyond it the sky faded from palest lemon to cobalt blue in a watercolor wash without boundaries.
    The bedroom light went out.
    Rob hurried back. On the way he passed Chloe’s old swing.
    The wind rocked it, gently, back and forth.

S. SAILLE: WILLOW
    This window has a crack. There’s a draft, very faint, coming from outside. Maybe if I can break the glass I can get some sort of message out.
    The bird is in a cage. Like me. I hate that.
    I won’t eat anything.
    All I can see is forest. The castle is in the middle. He calls it a caer.
    I wonder if Mum and Dad and Mac are devastated without me.
    I wonder if Rob’s sorry now.

Anger grows in the deep places.
Deep, under the earth.
    T HE B OOK OF T ALIESIN
    T here was always a dig going on somewhere around Avebury. Every summer people came, usually students on some university course on the Neolithic or Bronze Age, cutting trenches out on the Beckhampton Avenue to find if it was really there, or investigating anomalies from aerial photos.
    Silbury Hill was the strangest place in a landscape of strangeness. Rob could understand avenues of stone, and circles of them even; he could imagine processions, and dancing and, as Dan reckoned, bloodthirsty sacrifices, but with all the hills around why build an artificial one? Huge and conical, shaggy with grass, the vast mound dominated the downs. Even from here on the Ridgeway he could see it, peeping over the top of Waden, a platform in the sky. It could be a tomb, but no one was buried in it. It could be a place to observe the stars. He had no doubt that the Cauldron people would tell him it was the womb of the earth goddess. Getting back on the bike, he cycled over ruts, the bag on his back jolting. There were things you could never find out about the past. Digging up bits of antler could only tell you so much. The stories to explain them were all gone. Like what had made Callie rear up that day. What had flung Chloe off her back. As he came to the A4, he stopped, waiting for a gap in the traffic. They must have had artists, those Stone Age people. Decorating pots, making statuettes. Maybe a great artist designed Silbury. Maybe it had no purpose, but just was. Did art need a purpose?
    He cycled across the road. Beyond it the Ridgeway dropped; it passed a line of burial mounds and then crossed the Kennet on a tiny, rickety bridge, leading him to the back lane of West Overton. He cycled faster now, on the tarmac.
    It took ten minutes to find the dig. Here in the valley there were none of the wide, open views of the downland; hedges and houses and church towers gathered