"Ysabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER XIX

She came from the back of the cave, from shadow and dream to where the light slanted through the wide window of that southern opening, reaching her.

Ned hadn’t thought he’d ever see her again. Her presence became a different kind of blow to the heart. He wanted to kneel, explain, apologize. He didn’t know what to do. He was here, he had done it, and he was empty of thought, or any sense of how to act.

She walked towards him, the auburn hair bright as the late-day sunlight touched her. She was as tall as he was.

She stopped, regarding him, and smiled, not unkindly.

“It is difficult to stay down there,” she said. “There is too much wind. It feels as if the mountain wants to throw you off…or send you into the chasm.”

He nodded jerkily. He couldn’t speak. The sound of her voice undid him, left him feeling bereft with the thought that he might be hearing it now and never again.

He thought of the sculpture in the cloister. Phelan’s offering, showing her as half gone from the beginning, even before time began its work. Eluding as she emerged. He understood it now. You saw Ysabel as you stood before her, heard that voice, and you felt loss in the moment because you feared she might leave you.

Because you knew she would.

She was gazing steadily at him, appraising, more curious than anything else. Her eyes were blue, or green. It was difficult to tell, there were shadows behind her and above. There was no malice, no anger here, though he couldn’t see warmth, either. But why should he have expected that? What could he possibly have expected?

“How are you here?” she said.

That, at least, he should have been ready for. But it was difficult to form thoughts that made sense. Stammering, he said, “You…you said sacrifice. At Entremont. Not just killing.”

Amusement, the eyebrows arched. She was barefoot on the cold stone, he saw. Wearing a long, white cotton skirt and a blue blouse over it. Her hair was down, along her back, framing her face.

“I did,” she agreed, still studying him. “You were there?”

He nodded.

“Unwise. You might have died, had they known it.”

He nodded. Phelan had known it. He didn’t say that.

“There are many places of sacrifice,” she said.

They’d figured that out, too. He said, “My mother got the sacrifice part, when we told her. And…a boar gave me a clue.”

He didn’t tell about Melanie, the story she’d told him of the battle below. The sacrifice of the chieftains here. He was going to need to speak of Melanie, he had no idea how.

Her expression changed. “Your mother gave you that?” She was pointing at the bracelet. The stone was bright.

He shook his head. “My aunt. Her sister.” He hesitated. It wasn’t his, but, “Would you like it?”

She smiled, pleased, but shook her head, looking at him.

A long, still moment, quiet in the cave, the wind blowing outside, the sun going down. The living world so far from where they were.

Then Ysabel smiled again, but differently.

“Now I see,” she said, and the tone had altered as well, changes in her voice and face, like ripples in water. Ned wasn’t sure—he wasn’t sure of anything—but he thought he heard sadness, and maybe something else.

“What is there to see?”

She didn’t answer. She turned away—he felt it as a wound—then she lifted a hand, stilling him.

He heard it too, and was looking towards the entrance through which he’d come himself when Cadell jumped down and in.

He landed, noted Ned’s presence. Then he turned to Ysabel.

He didn’t speak, and the woman said nothing either, absorbing, accepting what was inescapable in his face. There was nothing hidden in him, nothing held back. Watching the two of them Ned felt like the intruder he was: excluded, inappropriate, trivial. If he was right, if he understood this at all, Cadell had died more than two thousand years ago, in the chasm below this cave.

“You have a wound,” she said, speaking first.

“A knife. It is inconsequential.”

“Indeed. What would be of consequence?”

Ned remembered that ironic tone from Beltaine, after the fires and the bull. He realized his hands were shaking again.

Cadell’s deep voice carried a note that could only be called joy. He said, “Coming here to find the Roman before me. That would shatter this heart as much as would the sky falling at the end of days.”

“Ah,” she said, “the poet returns?”

“He never left you. You know that, love.”

“I know very little,” she said, in that voice that made a lie of the words.

“You know that I am here, and before your three nights have turned. I remember this place.”

“But of course you do,” said another voice, from behind Ned and below.

They all wheeled. But even as he did, Ned saw Ysabel’s face, and he realized she was unsurprised.

They watched as Phelan pulled himself up from the slanting plateau below the opening to the south.

He stood, unhurried, brushing dust from his knees and the torn jacket, using his right hand only. Then he, in turn, looked at the woman.

“A wound?” said Ysabel.

“Inconsequential.” Ned saw the bald head, the scar, the grey, cool eyes and then—with surprise—a smile.

“You heard that?” She was smiling, too.

“It is my proof of being present, love. I need to have heard that or you might not believe me.”

“You would lie to me?”

He shook his head. “Never in any life. But you have disbelieved before.”

“With cause?”

Phelan looked at her. Then shook his head again. “With a right to do so, but not with cause.”

The brief smile had gone. There was hunger in his face, and longing, so fierce they were a kind of light.

“You were below,” said Cadell flatly.

“A harder climb, yes, but I was south and had to come that way.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were not here.”

Phelan shrugged. “No? Tell me, what did she ask the boy, about his bracelet?”

Ned felt the weight of three gazes upon him. He wanted to be invisible, absent, gone.

Then he heard her laughter. “I see. You will say that you did hear, and so came to me first?”

Phelan was looking at the other man, his eyes cold as wilderness, waiting. The light in his face was gone. There was no reply from the Celt. Phelan said, precisely, “She asked him if his mother gave the bracelet to him. Shall I tell now his reply that you also did not hear?”

Wolf on a mountain peak.

Cadell’s blue gaze, returning, was as hard, though, unyielding. It never had yielded, Ned knew.

“It makes no matter how and where you climbed or what you heard below. You were not here to find her first.”

A silence in that high place. It felt like the last silence of the world, Ned Marriner thought.

Ysabel ended it. Ended more than stillness.

“He was not. It is true,” she murmured. “But neither were you, my golden one. Alas, that I am unloved, but neither were you.”

And as she stopped, as that voice fell away, the three of them turned to Ned again.

It might have been the hardest thing he’d yet done, to stand straight, not draw back. Face them, breathing hard, but controlling it. He looked from one man to the other, and ended with Ysabel. The long travel of her gaze, how far it seemed to go, to reach him.

“He is not part of this,” Cadell said.

“Untrue,” she said, still softly. “Did he not lead you here? Will you say he did not? That you found me yourself?”

“The boar guided him,” Phelan said. “The druid’s.”

No fire or ice now. A sudden, intense gravity that was, in its own way, more frightening. As if the stakes, with what she’d said, had become too high for fury or flame.

“It isn’t the druid’s boar,” said Cadell. “Brys served it, not the other way around.”

“I didn’t know that,” Phelan said. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought. The beast is older than any of us.”

Phelan’s thin smile. “Even us?”

Cadell nodded. The light from the south caught his golden hair.

The woman remained silent, letting them speak across her, to each other.

“And so it was the boar…caused this?”

Cadell shook his head. “It made this possible, at best. The boy could have died at Entremont, in Alyscamps, by the round tower. I could have killed him in Glanum where I killed you, once.” His turn to smile, lips closed. “You could have killed him many times. Is it not so?”

Phelan nodded. “I suppose. I saw no reason to have him die. I helped them get away, when the needfires were lit.”

“Perhaps a mistake.” The deep voice.

The other man shrugged. “I have made others.” He looked at Ysabel, and then at Ned again, his brow furrowed now.

Cadell said, “We could have been here ahead of him. I saw him fall, twice. The boar made this harder for him, showing us where he was going.”

“And your meaning is?”

Cadell’s teeth flashed this time. “My thinking is too hard for you? Really? You said the boar caused this. It isn’t so.”

And still the woman did not speak.

She stood as if barely attending to them, withdrawing even as she remained. Ned thought of the sculpture again, sunlit in the sheltered cloister. It was cold here now, so far above the world.

Phelan said, “There is another way to see it, if you are right—the animal bringing us both.”

“Yes. I also have that thought.”

“I killed you once here, did I not? With some others.”

“You know you did. They were lost in the chasm.”

“Not you.”

“They were lost,” Cadell repeated quietly.

Phelan’s wintry smile. “You cling to that, among so many deaths.”

“It is more than dying, there.”

“Not for you, with me alive to hold you to returning. You would have known it even as you went down.”

“They didn’t. They were lost there.”

“Yes. Not you.”

“So I owe you my life?” The bite of irony.

They actually smiled at each other in that moment. Ned would remember that.

“As you said,” Phelan murmured. “We could have arrived ahead of him.”

“As I said.”

They both looked at Ned again.

He said, in a small voice, “I’m sorry, I think.”

Cadell laughed aloud.

“No, you aren’t,” said Phelan. “You’ve been refusing to leave this from the outset.”

A small, maybe a last, flare within. “You don’t know me well enough to say what I feel,” Ned said.

A moment, and then Phelan—stranger, Greek, Roman—nodded. “You are right. Forgive me. It is entirely possible to need or want something, and be sorry it is so.” He hesitated again. “It appears I did more than I intended when I brought you into this. I could not say, even now, what made me do it. What I saw.”

“No? I can,” said Ysabel, breaking her stillness, returning to them. Then she added, with sudden passion, “Look at him!”

The two men did so, again. Ned closed his eyes this time, his mind racing, lost. He opened them. And saw, in both men at the same moment, a dawning as of light—and then a setting of the sun.

Neither spoke for a long time.

Cadell made one quick, outward gesture with his good hand that Ned didn’t understand. Then he pushed fingers through his long hair. He drew a deep breath. Lifted the hand, and let it fall again. He turned to Phelan.

“You truly didn’t know,” he said to the other man, “when you drew him in?”

Phelan hadn’t moved. Or taken his gaze from Ned. He still didn’t. “I knew something. I said that. Not this. How would I know this?”

Know what? Ned wanted to scream. He was afraid to speak.

Cadell, quietly, said, “We might have realized, when we saw the mother and her sister.”

Phelan nodded. “I suppose.” He was white-faced, Ned saw. Shaken to the core, trying to deal with it.

Cadell pushed a hand through his hair again. He turned to Ysabel. She was standing very straight now, extremely still, gathered to herself: a beauty near to stone, it might seem, but not truly so.

The big man looked at Ned for a moment, and then back to her. He said, wonderingly, the deep voice soft, “The mother has your hair, even, near enough.”

At which point, finally, very late, overwhelmed as if to a cliff’s edge of stupefaction, feeling that waves were crashing there against his mind, Ned Marriner understood.

Who are you?

The repeated question, over and again. The one he’d hated, having no answer. Now he did. Ysabel had given it to the three of them.

The world rocked and spun, unstable and impossible. Ned made a small, helpless sound; he couldn’t stop himself. This was too vast, it meant too many things, too many to get your head around.

He saw Phelan looking at her.

The wide, thin mouth quirked sideways. “When?” he whispered. And then, “Whose?”

Ned stopped breathing.

She smiled, grave and regal, not capricious or teasing now. She shook her head slowly. “Some things are not best told. Even in love. Perhaps especially in love. Is it not so?”

More questions than answers in the world, Ned thought.

Phelan lowered his head.

Her smile changed a little. “You knew I would say that?”

He looked up. “I never know what you will say.”

“Never?” Faint hint of irony, but a sense she was reaching a long way for it.

“Almost never,” he amended. “I did not expect this. None of this. Not the searching you decreed, forbidding battle. Not the boy being…what you say he is. Love, I am lost.”

“And I,” Cadell said. The other two turned to him. “You altered the story. He led us here. The boar guided him, and us. This means?”

This means?

Ysabel turned to Ned. The clear, distant gaze. The eyes were blue, not green, he saw. And something was unmistakable now. You would have to be blind, or truly a child, not to see it: the sadness that had come. She looked steadily at him and said, more softly than any words yet spoken, “What must I answer him, blood of my blood?”

He didn’t reply. What could he possibly say? But he saw now—he did see—an answer to the one question, about his being here and his aunt and his mother, and their mother and hers, fathers or mothers back to a distant presence of light down a long tunnel from the past.

Where the woman before him waited in a far, faint brightness.

She turned from him, not waiting for an answer. Looked to one man and then the other. “You know what it means,” she said. “You know what I said beside the animal that died to draw me into the world again. Neither of you found me first. You know what follows. The chasm is here. It is still here.”

What will follow, you should not see.

Phelan had said that to him, at Entremont. But Ned had stayed, and seen, and led them here to this.

“You never said there was a child,” Cadell murmured.

And Ysabel, quietly, echoed him. “I never said there was a child.”

“Only the one?” Phelan’s eyes never left her now.

“Only the one, ever. One of you killed the other, and then died himself, too soon, leaving me alone. But not entirely so. That time. I was carrying a gift.”

“You do know what it will mean, love, if we go down together there? Both of us.”

Cadell, the deep voice soft, but unafraid. Making certain.

She inclined her head gravely. “We all know what it will mean. But neither of you found me, and the boy is in the story.” She had never seemed so much a queen as she did then, Ned thought, staring at her.

The two men turned—he would remember this, too—to look at each other. Fire and ice subsumed in something he wasn’t smart enough—hadn’t lived nearly long enough—to name.

Phelan turned back to her. He nodded his head slowly.

“I believe I see. An ending, love?” He hesitated. “Past due, must we say?”

Ysabel shook her head suddenly, fierce in denial. “I will not say that! I would never say that.”

She turned to the bigger man. One and then the other. One and then the other. Ned wanted to back away, against the cave wall, feared to draw attention by moving.

She said to Cadell, “Do you still believe our souls find another home?”

“I always have, though perhaps not all of us. We have had a different arc, we three. I will not presume as to my soul. Not from that chasm.”

“You will search for me? Wherever I am? If there is a way?”

Ned was crying now. He did back up until he bumped into the cold stone wall by the opening to the south. He could feel the wind here.

Cadell said, in that voice men and women might follow into war and across mountain ranges and through forests and into dark, “Wherever you are. Until the sun dies and the last wind blows through the worlds. Need you ask me? Even now?”

She shook her head again, and Ned heard her say, “No, I didn’t need to ask, did I? My shining one. Anwyll.”

Beloved.

Cadell stood another moment looking at her, memorizing her, Ned wanted to say it was, and then—not reaching out, not touching her—he said, “It is time to go, then, I believe.”

He turned and came this way towards the opening. At the edge of the drop he paused beside Ned and laid a hand upon his shoulder. No words.

Nor for the other man, though he did turn and they exchanged a glance, grey eyes and blue. Ned, weeping in silence, felt as if he could hear his blood passing through the chambers of his heart. Blood of my blood.

Cadell went down then, jumping over the edge to the steeply sloped plateau. Ned saw him in the late sun’s shining, the very last of the day’s light, as he walked over to the low, dark green bushes that surrounded the chasm that was a place of sacrifice, said in the tales to be bottomless.

He did pause there, but not in anything like fear, nothing of that at all, for when he looked up and back, past the two men to the woman, he was smiling again, golden and at ease.

And that is how Ned Marriner last saw him, through tears that would not stop, when he took a final step and went over to his ending without a sound.

Ned looked at emptiness where a man had been. He turned his face away. He saw a pair of birds wheeling to the south, across the mountain’s side. The sky was not falling, though this was a time and place where you could imagine it doing so.

He turned back, to Phelan. That one stood another moment, looking down at the chasm. Then he came forward towards the drop to the plateau. He passed close, as Cadell had. He didn’t touch Ned, though. Instead, he slipped out of his grey leather jacket and laid it, lightly, on Ned’s shoulders.

“It will be cold when the sun goes down,” he said. “There is a tear, I’m afraid, in one shoulder. Perhaps it can be repaired.”

Ned couldn’t speak. His throat was aching, and his heart. Tears made it difficult to see. Phelan looked at him another moment, as if he would say something else, but he didn’t.

He went over the edge, lightly down as always, landing easily, and he went to the chasm’s brink as the other man had done.

Ned heard Ysabel behind him. He didn’t turn. He was afraid to look at her. The man below them did, though. He did look.

“Anwyll,” Ned heard her say, again.

The man so addressed smiled then, standing on a mountain so far from the world into which he had been born, claimed there by sunlight, which had not changed in all the years.

He looked past Ned, to where she would be. He spoke her name.

“Every breath,” he said to her, at the end. “Every day, each and every time.”

Then he stepped over the rim and down into the dark.

AFTER A FEW MOMENTS motionless against the cave wall, Ned had to sit down. He lowered his legs over the edge of the drop, looking out on the end of day and at the slanting ledge where no one stood any more. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel this much sorrow, so hard and heavy an awareness of time.

Until the sun dies.

The sun was going down, would rise in the morning—people had to make themselves believe that it would each time nightfall came. He remembered Kate Wenger, only last night, talking of how sunset had never been a moment of beauty or peace in the past. Men and women fearing that the dark might come and not end.

He had stopped crying. He was drained of tears. He wiped at his cheeks, felt the bite of wind swirling. Two more birds, or the same ones, wheeled down and east and out of sight again. Phelan’s jacket lay across his shoulders. He looked over at the chasm, half hidden by bushes. He wished he knew a prayer to speak, or even think.

He heard a sound behind him, but didn’t turn.

He was afraid, too achingly aware of what role he’d played here. He didn’t think he could look at what would be in her face. His mother, Cadell had said, had her hair. Her great-grandmother was said to have had the second sight. There were family stories further back.

And his aunt…

Ned sighed, it seemed to come from so deep inside it felt bottomless. He had been in this, after all. It was his family, and Phelan seemed to have been aware of something—without knowing what— from that beginning in the cathedral, first day.

Ysabel stepped nearer. More a presence than a sound. He was painfully conscious of her. The two of them alone now. She would be looking down and remembering two thousand six hundred years. How did you come to terms with something ending after so long? Who had ever had to deal with that?

Because it was over. Ned knew it as keenly as the three of them had. They had collided with a wall—with him—and the intricate spinning had come to a close on this mountain.

He shook his head. So many ways it might have been otherwise. Brys had tried to kill him in the cemetery. He could have been too sick to climb when he got here. Either of the two men might have been quicker than Ned. Both had said these things. It was not preordained, what had just happened, not compelled.

Did that mean he had killed them? Or set them free?

Did the choice of words make a difference? Did words matter at all here?

“Oh, God. Ned, you did it,” were the words he heard.

They mattered. They mattered so much they powered him to his feet, whirling around.

Melanie stood in front of him. With her black hair and the green streak in it, and a smile so wide, through tears, it seemed it could light the shadows of that cave.

“I don’t believe it!” he said. “It…she…you’re back!”

And Ysabel was gone.

He had been right, then, to see her as going away even as she stood there. Joy now, fierce and searingly bright, mixed with something that might never leave him. Someone returned, was rescued, someone was gone. Was this the way it always was?

She said, “You brought me back.”

“I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life.”

“Is that so?” she said, and he heard a note, of irony, that echoed someone else, not Melanie.

He couldn’t speak. He was stunned, buffeted. She stepped close and put her hands behind his head, lacing her fingers there, and she kissed him, standing on the edge of the plateau in the wind. She didn’t actually rush it. There was a scent to her he couldn’t remember from before. It was dizzying.

She stepped back. Looked at him. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, maybe with the tears. “I probably shouldn’t be doing that.”

He was still having some trouble breathing. “Only reason I came to France,” he managed.

She laughed. Kissed him again, lightly this time. It felt, impossibly, as if it was Melanie doing that, but also not quite Melanie. Or maybe it wasn’t impossible. Not after what had happened here. He suddenly remembered Kate, walking up to Entremont, the change in her, with Beltaine coming on.

“Thank you,” Melanie said, still very close.

“Well, yeah,” he said, light-headed from the feel of her and her scent, and the strangeness of his thoughts. Then something else registered, really belatedly. He stepped to one side, looking more closely at her.

He felt himself beginning to grin, despite everything. “Oh, Lord!” he said.

Melanie looked suddenly awkward, uncertain, more like herself. “What is it?”

He started to laugh, couldn’t help himself. “Melanie, jeez, you are at least three inches taller. Look at yourself!”

“What? That can’t be…and I can’t look at myself!”

“Then trust me. Come back, stand close.”

She did. It was as he’d said. At least three inches. She came up to his nose now, and no way she’d been even close to that before.

“Holy-moly, Ned! I grew?”

“Sure looks like it.” No one else he’d ever known said “holy-moly.”

“Can that happen?”

He was thinking about his aunt. Her hair turning white all at once. What his mother had refused to believe, for twenty-five years.

“I guess it can,” was all he said. “We don’t know a whole lot about any of this.”

“I grew?” she said again, in wonder.

“You’re going to be dangerous,” he said.

She flashed a smile that evoked someone else who was gone. “You have no idea, Ned Marriner.”

Someone returned, someone went away forever. He hesitated. “Melanie, were you aware of anything, when you were…?”

The smile faded. She looked through the opening to the south, plateau and plain, river, more mountains, the sea.

“Just at the beginning,” she said quietly. “And even then it was difficult. When…when I started changing, I could feel it happening, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop walking. I could see out through her eyes at first, and hear things, but it got hard. Like pushing a weight up, a big boulder, with my head, my shoulders, trying to look out from beneath? And then it started to be too heavy. And after a while I couldn’t.”

She was still gazing out.

“So you don’t know what happened here? Just now?”

“You’ll tell me?”

“What I know. But…did you make her change things, have them look for her. And pick this place?”

She had started to cry again. She nodded. “I did do that. I could do…I knew from inside her what was supposed to happen, and that I was gone if one of them killed the other and claimed her. So I pushed the only idea I had, which was trying to get her to come here instead, and hope someone would remember it.” She looked at him. “You, actually, Ned. I didn’t think anyone else could.”

“You understood what might happen, if they all came here?”

“I knew what she knew.” She wiped at her cheeks. “Ned, I was her, and still me, a little. Then it got too hard and I could only wait, underneath.”

“You knew I was there? At Entremont?”

A flash of the old Melanie in her eyes. “Well, that’s a dumb question. What was I doing there in the first place?”

He felt stupid. He’d called her. “Right. Sorry.”

Her expression changed. “Don’t ever say sorry to me, Ned. Not after this.”

He tried to make it a joke. “That’s a risky thing to tell a guy.”

She shook her head. “Not this time, it isn’t.”

His turn to look away, out over so much darkening beauty. “We should get down. This isn’t a normal place.”

“Neither are we,” said Melanie. “Normal. Are we?”

He hesitated. “I think we mostly are,” he said. “We will be. Can you walk, like that?”

She looked at her bare feet. “Not down a mountain, Ned. And it’ll be dark.”

He thought. “There’s a chapel I saw. Just below the peak. Not far. We may not be able to get inside, but there’s a courtyard, some shelter. I can call down from there.”

“Auto-dial Greg?”

It was Melanie again. Taller, but this was her. He smiled. Happiness was possible, it was almost here. “Very funny,” he said. Another thought. “Greg was pretty amazing, you know.”

“You’ll have to tell me. You’re right, though, we should go. I’m cold. Ysabel was…pretty tough, I guess.”

Ysabel had been many things, he thought.

He took off the leather jacket and gave it to her.

“Where’d you get this?” she said, slipping her arms into the sleeves. It was big on her; she looked like an urchin in it.

“I’ll tell you that, too. We go?”

They left through the eastern opening, the way Ned had come in. Melanie winced a couple of times, barefoot on stones.

Ned stopped just outside and looked back, standing where he’d skidded to a stop, sliding down. He could see the rock he’d grabbed. It was dark inside the cave now towards the back, the light didn’t reach that far. There was nothing, really, that you could see.

Melanie was looking at him, wearing Phelan’s jacket. “You’ve changed too, you know,” she said.

“Three inches taller?”

“No, you have, Ned.”

He nodded. “Come on, it’s just up here, then to the left.”

When they topped the ridge and looked west towards the cross and chapel, standing utterly alone on the mountain, the sun was ahead of them, very low, lighting clouds. The sunset was glorious, a gift.

They lived in an age, Ned Marriner thought, when it was possible to think that way.

HIS PACK was where he’d left it against the stone wall. He pulled on his sweatshirt; it was bitingly cold now in the evening wind. The chapel was locked, so was the other long, low room off the courtyard, with a padlock. The courtyard itself offered some protection from the swirling gusts.

“I’ll give you my socks,” he said, “or you’re going to freeze.”

Melanie nodded. “Never thought I’d be happy about that kind of offer.” She’d zipped the jacket all the way up to her nose, but that wouldn’t help enough if she was barefoot here.

“You have a pocket knife?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She held out a hand. He dug into his pack and handed her his Swiss Army blade, then sat on a stone bench against the building and began pulling off his running shoes to give her the socks.

“They aren’t the height of fashion,” he began, when he had them off and the shoes back on, “but they’ll—”

He stopped. She was standing at the entrance to the flat-roofed building beside the chapel and the door was open.

“How’d you do that?” he said, walking over.

“I have skills you don’t yet know about, Ned Marriner.”

That note in her voice. It was there again. He might have changed, but he sure wasn’t the only one.

“My dad picked a lock couple of days ago like that.”

A grin. “I taught him how.”

“What?”

She looked really happy. “He saw me do it once, when we were shooting in Peru, and got jealous. He made me show him how.”

“You,” he said, “are a criminal mastermind. Here’s the socks.”

She took them, and went inside. He got his pack and followed. There was no electricity up here, and the long, narrow room was dark. Ned threw open the shutters to the courtyard while Melanie put on his socks. He saw a fireplace, with wood stacked beside it. The place had probably been a dormitory or dining room for the chapel once. Now it looked like an overnight place for hikers.

“Think they’ll arrest us if we start a fire?”

“I could handle that,” Melanie said. “If they bring shoes.”

That reminded him.

He flipped open his phone and dialed his father. One ring.

“Ned?”

He felt himself smiling, despite exhaustion. A surge of emotion before he spoke. Fighting it, he said, “Yeah, it’s me. Dad, I got her.”

“What?”

“Got her back. We’re both fine.”

“Oh, dear God,” he heard his father say. And then he became aware that his dad was crying. He heard him relay the words. Then,

“Ned, Ned…here’s your mother.”

“Honey?” he heard. “You’re really okay?”

“I’m great, Mom, we both are. It’s going to be a really long story.”

“Can you get down?”

“Not now, Mom. It’s almost dark, and Melanie has no shoes. I think you guys have to come get us in the morning, with stuff for her.”

“Where are you now?”

“In this building beside the chapel. We got in. There’s a fireplace, it’s fine. We’re cool overnight. Can you meet us here first thing?”

“Of course we can. Ned, put Melanie on, your father wants to talk to her.”

“I’ll bet.”

He was still smiling as he handed her the phone.

“Boss?”

There was a silence. Melanie brushed at her eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “Thanks, all of you. I’m all right, I really am. You’ll see. I do need some things, if you can put Dr. Marriner on?” She walked towards a window. Ned went outside again into the courtyard. He crossed to the low southern wall, past the well.

He looked out on the darkened land. Lights were coming on below, in houses, farms, country restaurants. He saw headlights on the roads. He saw what had to be the highway, east-west. The Riviera resorts were only an hour from here. Bars and caf#233;s and yachts along the coast of the sea, glittering with light.

He imagined a ship sailing here from Greece a really long time ago, passing dark, forbidding forests and mountain ranges that hid whatever was inland from view, leaving it shrouded and mysterious. He imagined them finding a harbour west of here, those strangers from far away, then their first encounter with a tribe, wondering if what they’d come all this way to find was death far from home, or something else.

He imagined those native warriors with their druids and rituals and forest gods, and goddesses of still pools, pictured them coming through the woods to see these strangers, wondering what they were, what they had brought here with them.

His heart was full, sorrow and joy taking all it could hold, right to the brim. He looked at the lights below, with the sun gone now. He saw the moon to his left, towards where the resorts would be, playgrounds of the world he knew.

He knew another world now. Had touched it. Would walk in both, in a way, for the rest of his life. He thought of the boar.

Hands flat on the low stone wall in the wind, he thought of Ysabel as the night drifted down.

“Come on,” he heard from behind him. “I found matches, we’ve got a fire. Did you bring anything someone could call food?”

He turned back to Melanie, to the world.

“Veracook packed me some stuff.”

“God bless her,” Melanie said in the doorway.

He walked over, followed her in. The fire was going nicely. She’d lit candles, too.

“There are blankets in those cupboards,” she said. “Lots of them.”

“Good. We’ll be okay.”

Melanie grinned at him. “Sailor,” she said, “you might even be better than okay.”

That, predictably, got his heart beating faster. He cleared his throat, as an image, inescapable, inserted itself in his awareness.

“Melanie, my mother’s there. She’ll be coming up tomorrow and looking me in the eye.”

“Good point. And I work for your dad, don’t I? I might have trouble facing them if we…”

“You?” he said. “You might have trouble? You know my mother! You think I can get away with pretending we played Twenty Questions? Animal, vegetable, mineral?”

She laughed softly. “Only if we play Twenty Questions.”

“Not why I joined the navy.”

Melanie’s expression altered. She looked at him a moment. “You know, you really have changed.”

“Well, so have you.”

“I guess.” She smiled at him. She looked older, he thought, but didn’t say. She lifted a hand and touched his cheek. Her eyes seemed darker, so did her voice, somehow.

“Ned, I have a pretty good idea what you did today. I remember what this place was like for you, when we drove here. And…this won’t be the only night of our lives.”

He cleared his throat again. “That’s a pretty hot thing to say.”

“Uh-huh. I know. Your birthday’s in July?”

He nodded. It was hard to speak, again. Women could do this to you.

“I’ll have to try hard to remember that,” Melanie said. “Now, let’s see what Vera put in there for you.”

She went over to his pack. He stood where he was. He could remember the feel of her lips in the cave, and there was that scent he hadn’t ever been aware of before.

“Um, the fifteenth,” he said suddenly. “July fifteenth.”

She was rummaging.

“Baguette, p#226;t#233;, cheese, apples. Vera’s a treasure,” she said. Then looked at him over her shoulder, a smile. “I have the date in my PDA. Meanwhile, come by the fire, let’s eat, and…” Her voice deepened again. “I’m thinking of something animal.”

“Oh, God!” he said.

She laughed aloud.

Outside, the night deepened and gathered. Boars, which fed at sunrise and at dusk, came cautiously out of woods below. Owls lifted from trees to hunt. Moonlight found ancient towns and the ruins of towers, triumphal arches and sacred pools, graveyards and vineyards and lavender bushes. One by one stars emerged in the dark blue dusk, in a sky that had not yet fallen.

IN THE BRIGHTNESS of morning they were waiting outside by the wall. They saw the others coming up along the switchbacks of the northern ridge. They’d have had to start before sunrise, Ned thought, in darkness, to be here by now.

It was harder to feel sorrow in the morning, he thought, seeing his father lift his hat in one hand and wave it. Melanie stood up and waved back with both hands over her head.

You can allow yourself joy, he thought. And even pride. He didn’t feel ill any more. He hadn’t since he’d entered the cave, since finding Ysabel.

They’d all come up, he saw, counting. Even Greg and Uncle Dave, who probably shouldn’t be doing two-hour climbs. His mother and his aunt were walking beside each other. Red hair and white like a fairy tale. It wasn’t, though; this was his family, and he had a different kind of tale for them. He swallowed hard, seeing the two of them like that, bright against the green of the trees and the blue lakes in the distance below.

They came zigzagging with the trail. He remembered, late yesterday, being pursued, cutting across these last switchbacks, up the rock face to get here.

They didn’t have to do that. He stood up beside Melanie and waited for the others to reach them along the last inclination. Just before they did, she looked at him and smiled.

It was more like four inches, he decided.

He grinned back. “Wonder if you could slam-dunk now?”

“Feels like,” she said.

Then she started running, in his socks and the white skirt and blue shirt Ysabel had worn. Ned saw his father open his arms and hug her close as if she were a lost child returned.

Greg and Steve stopped beside them, waiting their turn. His mother and uncle and aunt kept coming towards Ned. He saw Kate Wenger hanging back, suddenly shy.

“Yo, Mom,” he said. “You bring croissants?”

His mother, who was not much of a hugger, didn’t answer, she just enfolded him and didn’t let go.

“Whoa!” Ned said.

“No, whoa,” she murmured, gripping tightly. “No way.”

Eventually she stepped back, looking at him.

His aunt was smiling. “Yo, Nephew,” she said. “Want us to tell you how scared we were?”

“I can guess.”

“No, you can’t,” said Meghan Marriner, shaking her head. “You can’t come close.”

He looked at her. “I have a few things to tell you guys,” he said. “About us. Our family.”

The sisters glanced at each other.

“Which of them was the father?” Kim asked.

Ned’s jaw dropped. “Jeez!” he said.

“We were talking most of the night,” his mother said. “Fitted a few guesses together. Like a jigsaw.”

“A jigsaw,” he repeated, stupidly.

Uncle Dave laughed at his expression. “Ned,” he said, “believe me, it was scary listening to them. We can start being afraid around now.”

Ned didn’t feel afraid. It didn’t look like his uncle did, either. His mother and aunt were looking at him, waiting.

He cleared his throat. “She didn’t tell,” he said quietly. “They asked.”

Meghan said, “But we were right?”

Ned nodded, looked over at his uncle. “Aha. They weren’t sure. We’re still okay.”

“Barely,” said Dave Martyniuk. “This is just a beginning.”

They looked back at the others.

Edward Marriner led them up. Greg and Steve were grinning like kids. Melanie had her oversized tote now, and her cellphone and straw hat. Meghan went over and kissed her on both cheeks.

Ned looked at his dad. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello, son.” His father smiled.

“Take a good look around. Morning light. I don’t think you can go wrong up here. A lot of options. You’ll want to go look south, too, other side of this courtyard here. You shoot from C#233;zanne’s mountain, not up to it?”

His father nodded. “Had that thought, climbing up.”

“I had that thought a week ago!” said Melanie.

“Oh, of course you did,” said Greg.

Steve snorted, and walked away, towards where Kate was still hanging back. He was dialing his phone. Ned wondered who was left at the villa to call.

A moment later the sounds of “The Wedding March” were heard in the high, clear spaces at the summit of Sainte-Victoire.

“Dammit!” said Melanie, reddening. She stabbed for the answer button on her phone. “I took that ringtone off!”

Steve had turned back to them. He was laughing. So was Greg. So, actually, was Ned. Did you have to be mature all the time?

Steve sketched an oriental bow to Melanie. “Little Bird, learn lesson of life. That which is changed can be changed back in fullness of time.” He bowed again, hands pressed together.

“You are in so much trouble, the two of you,” she said.

“I am really, really happy to hear you say that,” said Greg. He looked at her, and frowned. “Hey, did you, like, grow or something?”

She smiled; it just about lit the mountainside.

MELANIE WENT BACK inside to change clothes. Ned’s father was eyeing the view, all directions. Ned knew that expression, the appraising look.

“Later,” Edward Marriner said, catching Ned’s glance. “I’ll come back.” He laid a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed.

Melanie came out. Seeing her in her own clothes and running shoes was a kind of shock. This was entirely her now, his father’s assistant, hyper-organized ringtone warrior.

Someone else even farther away now.

It made him thoughtful. He let the others go down first. Said he wanted a moment to himself. His mother looked at him, then started back along the path with the rest.

Ned found a boulder and sat down, his back against it, looking east to the sunrise, towards the last ridge he’d climbed yesterday. Up along it, then down to the right there was a cave.

He took a deep breath. Was it all going to recede? Would what had happened slip and drift like memories did? Become something you thought of at times, and then less often as years went by? A story, your history, as you were carried forward into other stories and other moments that became your life. Other people.

He heard a footfall, someone kicked a pebble.

“You, um, sleep with her last night?” Kate Wenger asked.

She came up beside him. She took off her sunglasses. Her expression was cool.

“What kind of a question is that?” he said, looking up.

“Obvious one, I’d say.”

“No gentleman would answer that.”

She waited.

Ned felt himself flush. “No, of course I didn’t.”

Kate smiled. “Good.”

She’d brushed her hair out, was wearing Ned’s black Pearl Jam T-shirt this time, over jeans. She’d done that trick girls did, tying it at her midriff, for the climb. It didn’t look much the way it did when he wore it.

“I prefer New York women, anyhow,” he said.

She sniffed. “Don’t make assumptions.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She grinned suddenly. “I don’t mind if you dream of it.”

Ned stared up at her, unable to think of anything to say. He looked away to his left again, beyond the ridge towards the Riviera, Italy, the sun. The land below them to the south had been a battlefield once. Probably more than once, he thought. It was bathed in a long, mild morning glory.

Kate extended her hands. “Come on, we’ll get too far behind.”

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, looking up at her.

She smiled again. “Nothing, I guess.”

He gave her both his hands and let her help him rise.

Never again will a single story be told

as though it were the only one.

— JOHN BERGER