Triskellion (36 page)

T
he damage was not as bad as Honeyman had feared, and he told himself that he shouldn’t really be surprised. The bee was a marvellously resilient little creature: the only insect that provided human beings with food and as tough in its own way as any one of them
.

At this time of year he had upward of forty thousand bees in each of his two colonies, and it looked as though he hadn’t lost more than a few thousand. Most importantly of all, both his fertile queens had survived. A couple of the hives were beyond repair, smashed into pieces by one of the Green Men’s huge trucks, but the majority were undamaged. He was delighted to see that the three wicker ones, or skeps, that had been used by his great-great-grandfather nearly two centuries before, had escaped unscathed
.

Honeyman reached into each hive, carefully removing the honeycombs one by one and checking for damage. He let the bees crawl across his hands and up his arms while he looked for cracks, gently laying aside those combs that were too badly
broken to be of any use. Then finally, he removed any dead bees; gathering the tiny bodies in an old plastic bucket as he moved from hive to hive and muttering a few words of regret and thanks for every single one
.

Each tireless worker. Each faithful drone
.

He would probably lose no more than three or four pounds of honey by the time he’d sorted the mess out, but still, it was a lot of the colony’s hard work gone to waste. It took the nectar of two million flowers to produce one pound of honey, with each bee flying the equivalent of one and a half times round the world
.

Honeyman was trying to figure out where one and a half times round the world was, when the bees began to swarm
.

He stepped back, alarmed for just a moment as he remembered what had happened to Reverend Stone, but he realized almost at once that the bees were not about to hurt him
.

They simply had a message to deliver
.

He watched as they began to dive and dart in numbers; moving together, then around, in three intersecting circles
.

The hum getting louder as they gathered and span in the morning air: a living, buzzing Triskellion…

And Honeyman knew
.

And jumped around for joy as the morning brightened across the village and the fields on every side. He performed a clumsy, joyful waggle dance of his own, because he knew that the mission had been accomplished. He knew that things were finally as they were meant to be, and that Gabriel was on his way home
.

He wondered what would become of Rachel and Adam, and his answer came tearing across the sky towards him from the direction of the moor
.

Black and buzzing; silhouetted against the buttery sun
.

Honeyman covered his ears as the helicopter clattered above him, then stood in front of his shack and watched, his bees whirling around his head, as it grew smaller and smaller. Until it was no more than a speck on the skyline
.

Zigzagging its way into the blue
.

I
n 1997, archaeologists excavated the body of a man from a Bronze Age burial on a farm in Dorset. DNA testing on the body proved that the farmer who currently farmed the land was the direct descendant of the man who had been buried over 3,000 years earlier.

Read an exclusive extract from the second
book in the thrilling
trilogy.

Available spring 2009

T
he helicopter was banking slightly, moving across an area of flat, black ground, when Rachel heard the pilot pass a crackly message to Laura Sullivan
.

She nodded and put away the notes she’d been reading
.

Rachel looked across to her mother and Adam, pressed closely against one another in the seats next to her. Adam’s cheek was flat against the window
.

They’d been flying for about an hour, maybe more, she thought, and she’d watched the landscape waking up below her as they passed low above it. A patchwork of green and brown fields, loosely stitched together by threads of irregular lanes, had given way to clumps of terracotta houses, becoming denser and more tightly packed as they approached the city. Lines of traffic had built up and begun to snake slowly along the main roads. Lights had winked in the windows and then faded as the sun struggled up to bleach them out, and Rachel had watched it bathing the crush of buildings and the twist of the river as they’d flown over the centre of London
.

Adam had sat forward, excited, and pointed out the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament and other landmarks familiar from films and pictures. Places they had seen but never visited
.

Rachel yawned. Beneath the rattle of the helicopter blades, she thought she could hear a faint buzzing, just for a second or two, and wondered if a bee was trapped somewhere in the cabin
.

Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz … dnk

She looked around and finally located the stowaway, slowly walking the glass circle of the porthole just above her head. With the sky behind it, the bee looked like a little man, exploring the surface of a new planet. She wondered if it had travelled with them from the village
.

One of Jacob’s, come to see them away safely
.

Laura turned round, reached across and laid a reassuring hand on her arm. She signalled to Rachel’s mother, told her that they would be landing in a few minutes. Rachel watched as her mother nodded and squeezed Adam’s hand. She smiled, but it was thin and weak
.

Her mother looked tired
.

Rachel was exhausted too: her brain and bones aching in equal measure. The last few hours, the last few weeks, seemed like a nightmare she was waking from, wrung out, but at least she knew that it was over. That she’d feel better when they were on the plane, and better yet eight hours or so from then, when they were finally home
.

From the window she could see the land stretching out to
one side, and if she craned her head, it was the same through the cockpit window: flat as far as she could see. Free of trees, free of anything
.

She heard the men up front talking on the radio, its squawk like the noise of some angry insect as the helicopter turned again
.

A complex of buildings came slowly into view ahead and to the left. It was single storey, and brown, and she could make out the line of a perimeter fence. She looked hard for aircraft, for a control tower, but could see nothing. It wasn’t like any airport she’d ever seen
.

“Laura? Where’re the planes?”

They came down fast, the large “H” in the landing circle growing bigger as they descended. They hit it dead centre with a bump that made Rachel’s teeth shake and she looked across at her brother to see if he was OK
.

He gave her a thumbs-up
.

Then everything happened very quickly…

Rachel was being pulled from the helicopter, out into the roaring wind of the rotor blades, turning to watch the same thing happen to Adam and trying to get close to her mother. But Laura was leading her mother away, putting some distance between her and the men who had emerged from a metal door in one of the smaller buildings
.

The men who had come to take her children
.

They wore headphones and sunglasses. They didn’t speak
.

Rachel tried to yank her hand away as she was led towards
the door, but the man escorting her only increased his grip. Adam cried out to her and they both cried out to their mother, but when Rachel turned to look she could see that her mother was sobbing and shaking her head, that Laura was doing her best to keep her calm, shouting over the noise of the engine as it died
.

Telling her that everything was going to be fine
.

Rachel watched, helpless, as Adam was ushered fast through a door, several metres away to her right. He shouted something to her which she couldn’t catch, his voice lost beneath the wind and the sound of her own grunts as she struggled to free herself
.

The nightmare hadn’t ended. She hadn’t woken up…

The last thing Rachel saw on the outside was a hazy line: the furious arc of the bee as it buzzed around her. She twisted her head to get a last look, to pass a last message, but then it too was shut out as the heavy metal door slammed hard behind her
.