The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [73]
The mare went down the bank with a scramble and a slither, and as we reached the path I saw, so inevitably that I felt no surprise -- nor indeed any thought at all -- another path, narrow and overgrown, leading out of the track to the other side, just opposite the grove of pines.
I hauled on the mare's mouth, and when she jibbed, trying to head down the broader track for home, I lashed her again. She laid her ears flat and went into the path at a gallop.
The path twisted and turned, so that almost straight away our pace slackened, slowed, became a heavy canter. This was the direction from which that dreadful sound had come. It was apparent even in the starlight that someone had recently been this way. The path was so little used that winter grass and heather had almost choked it, but someone -- something -- had been thrusting a way through. The going was so soft that even a cantering horse made very little noise.
I strained my ears for the sound of Cadal coming after me, but could not hear him. It occurred to me only then that both he and the boy must have thought that, terrified by the shriek, I had run, as Cadal had bidden me, for home.
I pulled Rufa to a walk. She slowed willingly, her head up, her ears pricked forward. She was quivering; she, too, had heard the shriek. A gap in the forest showed three hundred paces ahead, so light that I thought it must mark the end of the trees. I watched carefully as we approached it, but nothing moved against the sky beyond.
Then, so softly that I had to strain my ears to make sure it was neither wind nor sea, I heard chanting.
My skin prickled. I knew now where Belasius was, and why Ulfin had been so afraid. And I knew why Belasius had said: "Keep to the road, and be home before dark."
I sat up straight. The heat ran over my skin in little waves, like catspaws of wind over water. My breathing came shallow and fast. For a moment I wondered if this was fear, then I knew it was still excitement. I halted the mare and slid silently from the saddle. I led her three paces into the forest, knotted the rein over a bough and left her there. My foot hurt when I put it to the ground, but the twinges were bearable, and I soon forgot them as I limped quickly towards the singing and the lighter sky.
9
I had been right in thinking that the sea was near. The forest ended in it, a stretch of sea so enclosed that at first I thought it was a big lake, until I smelled the salt and saw, on the narrow shingle, the dark slime of seaweeds. The forest finished abruptly, with a high bank where exposed roots showed through the clay which the tides had gnawed away year after year at the land's edge. The narrow strand was mainly of pebbles, but here and there bars of pale sand showed, and greyish, glimmering fans spreading fernlike between them, where shallow water ran seawards. The bay was very quiet, almost as if the frost of the past weeks had held it icebound, then, a pale line under the darkness, you could see the gap between the far headlands where the wide sea whitened. To the right -- the south -- the black forest climbed to a ridge, while to the north, where the land was gentler, the big trees gave shelter. A perfect harbour, you would have thought, till you saw how shallow it was, how at low tide the shapes of rock and boulder stuck black out of the water, shiny in the starlight with weed.
In the middle of the bay, so centered that at first I thought it must be man-made, was an island -- what must, rather, be an island at high tide, but was now a peninsula, an oval of land joined to the shore by a rough causeway of stones, certainly man-made, which ran out like a navel cord to join it to the shingle. In the nearer of the shallow harbours made by the causeway and the shore a few small boats -- coracles, I thought -- lay beached like seals.
Here, low beside the bay, there was mist again, hanging here and there among the boughs like fishing