Triskellion (20 page)

Y
ellow tape marked an area fifteen metres or so away from the chalk circle, where four men had started digging, watched by another man in a leather jacket. The cameraman circled, camera on his shoulder, getting some general footage of their progress. Two days after their first meeting, Rachel and Adam stood with Laura Sullivan watching the preparations for the excavation.

“They’re starting a long way from the circle,” Rachel said.

“It’s perfectly normal,” Laura said. “We want to dig underneath without disturbing the surface of the circle itself. If it is Bronze Age, then whatever’s underneath will be no more than two, three metres below, so we’ll dig a shaft diagonally down to get to it.” She made an angle with her hand to show the kind of direction in which they were digging.

“Makes sense, I guess,” Rachel said.

Adam said nothing. The talk of digging, even the idea of being underground, made him shiver; his mind flashing back for an instant to a very dark place beneath the woods.

The man in the leather jacket walked away from the dig and across towards Rachel and Adam, rubbing his hands as if he had been doing some of the work.

“Ah, you must be our local experts. All the way from the US of A!” Dalton tried his hand at an American accent, oblivious to the look between Rachel and Adam. “Lovely Laura’s told me all about you.”

“Rachel, Adam … this is Chris Dalton our presenter,” Laura said.

“Presenter, executive producer and owner of the production company to be precise,” Dalton said. He gave a small bow and an elaborate flourish of his hand as if he were an Elizabethan courtier, while Laura nodded to affirm that what he had said was true. “So, Laura, have you been through the questions with young Adam?”

Laura nodded. “We’ve talked through a few facts about the surrounding area, the estimated age of the circle and so on. And we’ll show a few of the coins Adam has borrowed from Mr Honeyman to illustrate the point.”

“Great,” Dalton said. “That’ll give us a few sound bites.”

Adam looked puzzled.

“Chris means quotes,” Laura said. “So, are you happy to go through some stuff with Chris and Amanda?”

Amanda, the production assistant, had just waddled over, dressed head to toe in wet weather gear and carrying her ever-present clipboard. She smiled pleasantly and waved at Adam.

Adam waved back. “Sure.”

“I’m going back to the church,” Laura said. “To do a bit more work.” She turned to Rachel. “Do you want to come with me?”

In just two days, Rachel had come to feel that in Laura, she had found an adult she could really trust. Laura was everything she wished herself to be: intelligent, brave and honest. For the first time since she had come to Triskellion, she felt safe, she felt protected. And, having found a new friend, she was starting to think about Gabriel a good deal less.

She looked across at Adam and saw the same expression that had been plastered across his face for the last two days. She could tell he felt the same way about Laura that she did, though it was perhaps for different reasons. He stared at her when she talked, and blushed almost every time she spoke to him.

Despite their brief acquaintance, if Laura Sullivan had asked either of them to come with her, Rachel and Adam would have followed her anywhere.

In the church, Laura knelt down and took detailed digital photographs of the tomb and the faint inscription round its base.

“Any idea what it says?” Rachel asked. “The vicar thought it was something to do with a crusader called Sir Richard de Waverley.”

Laura stood up. “Yes, I’d read that, too. But there’s a couple of things that don’t add up.”

“Like what?”

“These are runes. You know what runes are?”

Rachel shook her head.

“They’re an early kind of alphabet that came even before the Saxons, say about two or three BC, OK?” Rachel nodded. “So if this guy Waverley was a crusader, he wouldn’t have been around until about nine hundred years later. See my problem?”

“So, what do the letters mean?” Rachel asked.

“Well, I’m not fluent in rune, but there are one or two symbols I recognize.” She knelt down again and Rachel knelt next to her. “This one here…” She pointed to a symbol that looked like a jagged streak of lightning.

“This means
sowilo
, or the sun. It’s a very ancient, powerful symbol. It was used as recently as the Second World War by the Nazis, as part of their insignia.”

Rachel pulled a face. She knew all about
them
.

Laura traced her finger over the next readable rune.

“This is a very common rune,
raido
, meaning journey or ride. So we’ve got sun-ride, or sun-journey maybe. Could relate to the shooting star on the stained glass window, perhaps. Then
there’s a few missing, but here’s the sun symbol again.” Laura pointed out another lightning shape. “But this time, it’s attached to the
mannaz
rune:

This one signifies ‘man’. So we’ve got sun-man, man of the sun, whatever that might mean…”

“Sun-worshipper?” Rachel suggested.

“Could be,” Laura said. “Back then people really did worship the sun. They didn’t just lie about in it all day.” She went back to the inscription. “Then it all gets a bit more mysterious.” She traced her finger over an area where the runes had been worn or deliberately chipped away. “This quite often happens, because ancient people were superstitious, thought the runes themselves had magic properties. Sometimes they’d destroy inscriptions they thought contained bad messages or curses.”

Rachel pointed to where the inscription became readable again. “What about these ones?”

“I’m not sure about most of them,” said Laura. “But that one is
iwaz
, the ancient name of the yew tree, which was really important to the druids.”

The name rang a bell with Rachel. “What’s a yew tree like?”

“They’re massive with huge, twisted trunks made from several parts grown together…”

“With kind of stripy red bark and evergreen leaves?”

“That’s the one,” Laura said. “They’ve always been significant landmarks, for sacred sites and so on.”

Rachel remembered the huge tree from which Adam had emerged with the Triskellion blade. As though the blade had been safeguarded by the tree for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Snippets of information came back to Rachel. “The leaves are poisonous, right?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Laura said. “They’ve always been powerful to the druids for that reason. They say that they used to get rid of unwanted babies by giving the pregnant mother yew berries.”

“Gross,” Rachel said, wincing. All the time, her head was spinning with flashes of information. With ideas and images that were beginning to knit themselves together little by little: the yew tree; the knight and the maiden; the baby twins; her mother; her grandmother; Gabriel…

Fragments of a dream. Pieces of a jigsaw.

“It’s not all bad,” Laura said without looking up. “They’re still using yew bark in chemotherapy today to combat cancer. Which gives us a clue to this last symbol,
kauna:

It means illness, so maybe illness refers to the poison of the
berries … so we’ve got yew-illness, something like that.”

The images swirled, screaming inside Rachel’s head, making her feel sick and dizzy.

Laura looked up. “You OK, Rachel? You look pale.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rachel said, steadying herself against the cool stone of the carved knight. She tried to refocus her mind. “So you think this tomb is much earlier?”

“Certainly the base of it is.” She nodded towards the carving. “I think our friend here, that the village has always thought was a crusader, is probably someone much, much older.”

“So, what about Sir Richard de Waverley?” Rachel asked, trying to put the pieces together.

Laura stood up and, like Rachel, instinctively patted the tomb. “If you ask me,” Laura said, “Sir Richard de Waverley never existed.”

“What?”

“Look, the Wing family has been at the centre of village life since records began, no question about it. They built Waverley Hall, the church, virtually all the village as we know it. I’ve done a heap of research on this and it looks to me like this Richard de Waverley character is something they made up.”

“Why would they do that?” Rachel asked.

“Who knows? Maybe to gloss over some family scandal way back, or to divert attention from what this tomb really represents.”

Rachel could feel the hair on her scalp prickling. She
blinked slowly and imagined herself standing on the edge of a precipice, looking down into the black mouth of a dreadful secret; about to tumble headlong into something from which there would be no return. “So who do you think it does represent?” she asked.

Laura took a step nearer the statue, reached out towards the crack that ran across the dead stone face. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”