down through the trees, moving from bole to black bole, avoiding the more precipitous places as much as possible.
Then they had reached a place where leaning stumps of stone, the bedrock itself, stuck up through the soil and leaf-mould; following which they had to negotiate an almost sheer face of crumbling rock down to a levelled area. And as he helped her down, so they had noticed the handiwork of man there under the dark trees.
They stood upon lichen-clad stone flags in front of …a mausoleum? That’s what the tumbled ruins had looked like, anyway. But here? Georgina had nervously clutched Ilya’s arm. This could hardly be considered a holy place or hallowed ground, not by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed that unseen presences moved here, lending their motion to the musty air without disturbing the festoons of cobwebs and dangling fingers of dead twigs that hung down from higher areas of gloom. It was a cold place – but lacking the normal, invigorating cold of winter – where the sun had only rarely broken through in … how many centuries?
Hewn from the raw stone of the hillside itself, the tomb had long since caved in; most of its roof of massive slabs lay in a tangle of broken masonry, where the flags of the floor were cracked and arched upwards from the achingly slow groping of great roots. A broken stone joist, leaning now against the thickly matted ruin of a side wall, had once formed the lintel above the tomb’s wide entrance; it bore a vague motif or coat of arms, hard to make out in the gloom.
Ilya, who had always had a fascination for antiquities of all sorts, had gone to kneel beside the great sloping slab and gouge dirt from its carved legend. ‘Well, now!’ his voice had sounded hushed. ‘And what are we to make of this, eh?’
Georgina had shuddered. ‘I don’t want to make any-thing of it! This is an entirely horrid place. Come away, let’s go on.’
‘But look – there are heraldic markings here. At least I suppose that’s what they are. This one, at the bottom is … a dragon? Yes, with one forepaw raised, see? And above it -I can’t quite make it out.’
‘Because the sun is setting!’ she’d cried. ‘It’s getting gloomier by the moment.’ But she had gone to peer over his shoulder anyway. The dragon had been quite clearly worked, a proud-looking creature chipped from the stone.
‘And that’s a bat!’ Georgina had said at once. ‘A bat in flight, over the dragon’s back.’
Ilya had hurriedly cleaned away more dirt and lichen from the old chiselled grooves, and a third carved symbol had come to light. But the great lintel, which had seemed firmly enough bedded, had suddenly shifted, started to topple as the rotting wall gave way.
Pushing Georgina back, Ilya had thrown himself off balance. Trying to scramble backwards himself, he’d somehow got his leg sticking straight out in front of him, directly under the toppling lintel. Still sprawling there as the slab fell, his cry of agony and the nerve-grating crunch as his leg broke and jagged bone sheared through his flesh came simultaneous with Georgina’s scream.
Then, perhaps mercifully, he had lost consciousness. She had leaped to free him from the lintel, only to discover that while it had broken his leg, it had not trapped him. The lower part of his leg flopped uselessly and fell at an odd angle when she touched it, but
miraculously it was not pinned. Then Georgina had seen and felt the break, the splintered bone projecting through red flesh and cloth, and the repetitive spurt of blood against her hands and jacket.
And that, until the moment of her awakening, had been the last that Georgina saw, felt or heard. Or rather, she had seen one other thing, and then forgotten it at once as she slumped to the ground. The thing she saw had remained forgotten, or more properly suppressed: it was the third symbol, carved above the dragon and the bat, which had seemed to leer at her even as the blackness closed in …
‘Georgy? We’re there!’ Anne’s voice broke the spell.