Ysabel. Guy Gavriel Kay
see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks. “You think for…our guy to see?”
Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.
He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”
“Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”
He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”
“Left it behind.”
“Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack.
He took it from her. “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again.
He looked at the guide. The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers on the tree were identical. He showed her.
“Nice,” she said. “It’s a Judas tree. Who’s Melanie?”
Figured, that she’d know the tree. “My dad’s assistant. He has three people with him, and someone from the publisher coming, and me.”
“And what do you do?”
He shrugged. “Hang out. Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around. “Anything here?”
“Fresh air. I was getting sick inside.”
“Me too, down there. I shouldn’t have gone.”
“Probably not.”
They were silent a moment. Then Kate said, in a bright, fake tour-guide voice, “The columns show Bible tales, mostly. David and Goliath is over there.”
She pointed to their right. Ned got up and walked over. His legs seemed okay. His heart was still pretty fast, as if he’d finished a training run.
He saw a linked pair of round columns supporting a heavy square one, which in turn held up the walkway roof. On the top square were carved two intertwined figures: a smooth-faced man above the much larger head and twisted-over body of another one. David and Goliath?
He looked back at Kate, who was still on the bench. “Jeez, how did you figure this out?”
She grinned. “I didn’t. I’m cheating. There’s another guide thing on the wall farther down. I read it when I came through from outside. The Queen of Sheba is on the other side.” She gestured across the garden towards the walkway opposite.
Because she was pointing, Ned looked that way, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise. And because he was standing where he was, he saw the rose resting against the two round columns of another pillar on the far side.
And it was then—just then—that he began to feel really odd.
It wasn’t fear (that had been in him awhile by then) or excitement; this was like something unblocking or unlocking, changing…just about everything, really.
Slowly, he went around that way along the shaded cloister walk, past the door to the street that Kate had used to get in. He would have gone out that way with her a moment before. Only a moment, and the story would have stopped for them.
He went along that side and turned up the far one, opposite where they’d been. Kate was still sitting on the wooden bench, the green backpack on the stone paving beside her. Ned turned his eyes to the pillar in front of him, with the single rose leaning between the two columns. He looked at the carving.
It wasn’t the Queen of Sheba.
He was as sure of that as he’d been about anything in his life. Whatever the printed sheet on the wall might tell you, that wasn’t who this was. They didn’t always know, the people who wrote brochures and guidebooks. They might pretend, but they didn’t always know.
He was aware of Kate getting up and coming towards him now, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the woman on the pillar. This was the only one of all the slender, doubled columns here that had a full-length figure on it. His heart was pounding again.
She was worn almost completely away, Ned saw, more eroded than any of the other, smaller carvings he’d passed. He didn’t know why that was, at first. And then, because of what was opening up inside him, he thought he did know.
She had been made this way, barely carved into the stone, the features less sharply defined, meant to fade, to leave, like something lost from the beginning.
She was delicately slender, he saw, and would have been tall. You could still see elegant, careful details in the tunic she wore and the robe that swept to her ankles. He could see braided hair falling past her shoulders, but her nose and mouth were almost gone, worn away, and her eyes could barely be seen. Even so, Ned had a sense—an illusion?—of a lifted eyebrow, something ironic in that slim grace.
He shook his head. This was an eroded sculpture in an obscure cloister. It should have been completely unremarkable, the kind of thing you walked right past, getting on with your life.
Ned had a sense of time suddenly, the weight of it. He was standing in a garden in the twenty-first century, and he was sharply aware of how far back beyond even a medieval sculpture the history of this ground stretched. Men and women had lived and died here for thousands of years. Getting on with their lives.
And maybe they didn’t always go away after, entirely.
It wasn’t the sort of thought he’d ever had before.
“She was beautiful,” he said. Whispered it, actually.
“Well, Solomon thought so,” said Kate mildly, coming to stand beside him.
Ned shook his head. She didn’t get it.
“Did you see the rose?” he said.
“What rose?”
“Behind her.”
Kate dropped her pack and leaned forward over the railing that protected the garden.
“There aren’t…there aren’t any rose bushes here,” she said, after a while.
“No. I think he brought it. Put it here before he went inside.”
“He? Our guy? You mean…?”
Ned nodded. “And he’s still here.”
“What?”
He had just realized that last part himself, the thought arriving as he formed the words. He’d been thinking, reaching within, trying to concentrate. And it had come to him.
He was scaring himself now, but there was something he could see in his mind—a presence of light or colour, an aura. Ned cleared his throat. You could run away from a moment like this, close your eyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real.
Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told us you were leaving. Why are you still up there?”
He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter. Things had changed. He would place the beginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of a woman carved in stone hundreds of years ago.
Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway.
There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street. If he hadn’t been so certain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, making him say and do entirely weird things.
Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility.
“I will now confess to being surprised.”
The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of the cathedral. They couldn’t see