YSABEL

GUY GAVRIEL KAY

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Simon and Schuster UK 2007

Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay 2007

Guy Gavriel Kay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007342037

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007352241

Version: 2016-10-03

For Linda McKnight and Anthea Morton-Saner

There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling, Whether as learned bard or gifted child; To it all lines or lesser gauds belong That startle with their shining Such common stories as they stray into.

—ROBERT GRAVES

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Part Two

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The woods came to the edge of the property: to the gravel of the drive, the electronic gate, and the green twisted-wire fence that kept out the boars. The dark trees wrapped around one other home hidden along the slope, and then stretched north of the villa, up the steep hill into what could properly be called a forest.

The wild boar—sanglier—foraged all around, especially in winter. Occasionally there might be heard the sound of rifle shots, though hunting was illegal in the oak trees and clearings surrounding such expensive homes. The well-off owners along the Chemin de l’Olivette did what they could to protect the serenity of their days and evenings here in the countryside above the city.

Because of those tall eastern trees, dawn declared itself—at any time of year—with a slow, pale brightening, not the disk of the sun itself above the horizon. If someone were watching from the villa windows or terrace they would see the black cypresses on the lawn slowly shift towards green and take form from the top downwards, emerging from the silhouetted sentinels they were in the night. Sometimes in winter there was mist, and the light would disperse it like a dream.

However it announced itself, the beginning of day in Provence was a gift, celebrated in words and art for two thousand years and more. Somewhere below Lyon and north of Avignon the change was said to begin: a difference in the air above the earth where men and women walked, and looked up.

No other sky was quite what this one was. Any time of year, any season: whether a late autumn’s cold dawn or midday in drowsy summer among the cicadas. Or when the knife of wind—the mistral—ripped down the Rhone valley (the way soldiers had so often come), making each olive or cypress tree, magpie, vineyard, lavender bush, aqueduct in the distance stand against the wind-scoured sky as if it were the first, the perfect, example in the world of what it was.

Aix-en-Provence, the city, lay in a valley bowl west of the villa. No trees in that direction to block the view from this high. The city, more than two thousand years old, founded by Romans conquering here—surveying and mapping, levelling and draining, laying down pipes for thermal springs, and their dead-straight roads—could be seen on spring mornings like this one crisply defined, almost supernaturally clear. Medieval houses and modern ones. A block of new apartment buildings on a northern slope, and—tucked into the old quarter—the bell tower of the cathedral rising.

They would all be going there this morning. A little later than this, but not too much so (two alarm clocks had gone off in the house by now, the one woman was already showering). You didn’t want to linger of a morning, not with what they were here to do.

Photographers knew about this light.

They would try to use it, to draw upon it as someone with a thirst might have drawn from an ancient well—then again at twilight to see how doorways and windows showed and shadowed differently when the light came from the west, or the sky was blood-red with sunset underlighting clouds, another kind of offering.

Gifts of different nuance, morning and evening here (noon was too bright, shadowless, for the camera’s eye). Gifts not always deserved by those dwelling—or arriving—in a too-beautiful part of the world, where so much blood had been shed and so many bodies burned or buried, or left unburied, through violent centuries.

But as to that, in fairness, were there so many places where the inhabitants, through the long millennia, could be said to have been always worthy of the blessings of the day? This serene and savage corner of France was no different from any other on earth—in that regard.

There were differences here, however, most of them long forgotten by the time this morning’s first light showed above the forest and found the flowering Judas trees and anemones—both purple in hue, both with legends telling why.

The tolling of the cathedral bells drifted up the valley. There was no moon yet. It would rise later, through the bright daylight: a waxing moon, one edge of it severed.

Dawn was exquisite, memorable, almost a taste, on the day a tale that had been playing out for longer than any records knew began to arc, like the curve of a hunter’s bow or the arrow’s flight and fall, towards what might be an ending.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Ned wasn’t impressed. As far as he could tell, in the half-light that fell through the small, high windows, the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence was a mess: outside, where his father’s team was setting up for a pre-shoot, and inside, where he was entirely alone in the gloom.

He was supposed to feel cool about being by himself in here. Melanie, his father’s tiny assistant, almost ridiculously organized, had handed him a brochure on the cathedral and told him, with one of her winks, to head on in before they started taking the test digitals that would precede the real photographs for the book.

She was being nice to him. She was always nice to him, but it drove Ned a bit crazy that with everything else she had to deal with, Melanie still—obviously—made mental notes to find things for the fifteen-year-old tag-along son to do.

Keep him out of the way, out of trouble. She probably knew already where the music stores and jogging tracks and skateboard parks were in Aix. She’d probably known before they flew overseas, googling them and making notes. She’d probably already bought a deck and gear on Amazon or something, had them waiting at the villa for just the right time to give them to him, when he looked completely bored or whatever. She was perfectly nice, and even cute, but he wished she didn’t treat him as part of her job.

He’d thought about wandering the old town, but he’d taken the booklet from her instead and gone into the cathedral. This was the first working day, first set-up for a shoot, he’d have lots of chances later to explore the city. They were in the south of France for six weeks and his father would be working flat out almost the whole time. Ned figured it was just as easy to stick around the others this morning; he was still feeling a bit disoriented and far from home. Didn’t have to tell anyone that, though.

The mayor’s office, in the city hall up the road, had been predictably excited that they were here. They’d promised Edward Marriner two uninterrupted hours this morning and another two tomorrow, if he needed them, to capture the facade of their cathedral. That meant, of course, that any people wanting to go in and out to pray for their immortal souls (or anyone else’s) were going to have to wait while a famous photographer immortalized the building instead.

As Greg and Steve unloaded the van, there had even been a discussion, initiated by the city official assigned to them, about men going up on ladders to take down a cable that ran diagonally across the street in front of the cathedral to the university building across the way. Ned’s father had decided they could eliminate the wire digitally if they needed to, so the students weren’t going to be deprived of lights in their classrooms after all.

Nice of us, Ned had thought.

Pacing back and forth, his father had started making crisp decisions, the way he always did when finally on location after the long buildup to a project. Ned had seen him like this before.

Barrett Reinhardt—the publisher’s art director for the book—had been here in Provence two months ago, preparing a list of possible photographs, emailing jpegs back to Edward Marriner in Montreal, but Ned’s father always preferred to react to what he saw when he got to a place he was shooting.

He’d pointed out a balcony off the second floor of the university, right above the square, opposite the facade, and decided they’d shoot with the digital camera from the ground, stitching a wide shot on the computer, but he wanted to go up to that balcony and use large-format film from there.

Melanie, following him around with her binder, had scribbled notes in different-coloured inks.

His father would make his photo selection later when he saw what they had, Ned knew. The challenge would probably be getting the tall bell tower on the left and the full width of the building into one shot. Steve had gone with the guy from the mayor’s office into the university to see about access to the balcony.

A crowd had gathered to watch them setting up. Greg, using adequate French and a smile, was making sure the spectators stayed around the edges of the square, out of the shots. A gendarme had come to assist. Ned had watched, sourly. His French was better than the others’, but he hadn’t actually felt like helping. He’d left at that point, and gone inside the cathedral.

He really wasn’t sure why he was in such a bad mood. On the face of it, he ought to have been really cool with this: out of school almost two months early, skipping exams (he did have three essays to write here and deliver in July back home), staying in a villa with a swimming pool while his dad and the others did their work…

Within the dark, high-vaulted cathedral, he abruptly removed his iPod buds and hit the off button. Listening to Houses of the Holy in here wasn’t quite as clever as he’d thought it would be. He’d felt silly and even a little bit nervous alone in a place this shadowy and vast, unable to hear anything around him. He could imagine the headlines: Canadian Student Stabbed by Led Zeppelin-Hating Priest.

The thought amused him, a little. He’d put it in an email to the guys back home later. He sat down on a bench halfway up the central aisle, stretched out his legs, and glanced at Melanie’s booklet. The cover photo was taken from a cloister. An arch in the foreground, a sunlit tree, the bell tower behind against a really blue sky. It was postcard pretty. It probably was on a postcard.

His father would never take a picture like it, not in a million years. Not of this cathedral. Edward Marriner had talked about that yesterday, while they’d watched their first sunset from the terrace.

Ned opened the brochure. There was a map at the front. The light was dim, but his eyesight was good, he could make it out. As best he could tell, from the map key on the facing page, this place had been built in a dozen stages over too many centuries by too many people who didn’t care what had been done before they arrived. A mess.

That was the point, his dad had explained. The facade they were setting up to shoot was hemmed in by Aix’s streets and squares. It was part of them, entangled in the city’s life, not set back to be admired the way cathedrals usually were. The front had three styles and colours of stone that didn’t come close to matching up with one another.

His father had said that was what he liked about it.

Remember why we’re doing this shot, he’d reminded everyone as they’d piled out of the van and started unloading. Perfect cathedral facades like Notre Dame in Paris or Chartres were snapped by every tourist who saw them. This one was different, and a challenge—for one thing, they couldn’t back up too much or they’d crash through a window into a university classroom and ruin a lecture on the eternal greatness of France.

Greg had laughed. Suck, Ned had thought, and reached for his earbuds.

That was when Melanie had fished the brochure from her black shoulder tote. The tote was almost as big as she was. The running joke was that half the missing objects in the world could be found in Melanie’s bag, and she had a good idea where the other half were.

Alone inside, Ned studied the map and looked up. Where he was sitting was called a nave, not an aisle. I knew that, he thought, inwardly imitating Ken Lowery’s exaggerated voice in science class.

As best he could tell, the nave had been finished in 1513 but the part just behind him was four hundred years older, and the altar ahead was “Gothic,” whenever that was. The small chapel behind that had been built around the same time as the nave where he was sitting. If you looked left or right, the dates got even more muddled.

He stood up and walked again. It was a little creepy being alone in here, actually. His footsteps, in Nikes, were soundless. He approached a side door with two heavy old iron locks and a new brass one. A sign said it led out to the cloister and listed the times for tours. The black iron locks did nothing any more, the new one was bolted. Figured. Couldn’t get out. That might have been a cool idea, sit in a cloister and listen to music. He didn’t have any religious music on the iPod, thank God, but U2 would have done.

The cloister, Melanie’s map informed him, was really old, from the 1100s. So was the side aisle where he was standing now. But the chapel up at the end of it was eighteenth century, the newest thing here. You could almost laugh. They could put a Starbucks somewhere in this place and it would fit as much as anything else did. Chapel of Saint-Java.

He walked towards that late chapel by the steps to the altar. Not much to see. Some fat white candles had burned down, none were burning now. People weren’t allowed inside this morning: Edward Marriner was at work out front.

Ned crossed in front of the altar and worked his way back down the other side. This aisle was from 1695, the map told him. He stopped to get his bearings: this would be the north side, the cloister was south, his father was shooting the west facade. For no good reason it made him feel better to work that out.

This was a shorter nave, hit a wall partway down. Ned found himself back in the main section, looking up at a stained-glass window. He found another bench near the last side chapel by the bell tower. Saint-Catherine’s, the brochure advised; it had been the university’s chapel.

Ned imagined students hurrying here to confession five hundred years ago, then back across the road to lectures. What did they wear to school in those days? He popped in his buds again, dialing Pearl Jam on the wheel.

He was in the south of France. Well, forgive him for not doing cartwheels. His father would be shooting like a madman (his own word) from now to the middle of June. The photographs were for a big-deal book next Christmas. Edward Marriner: Images of Provence, accompanying a text by Oliver Lee. Oliver Lee was from London but had lived down here for the last thirty years, writing (Melanie had told him all this) six novels, including some prize-winners. Star English writer, star Canadian photographer, star French scenery. Big-deal book.

Ned’s mother was in the Sudan.

The reports were of serious fighting again, north of Darfur. She was almost certainly there, he thought, leaning back on the bench, closing his eyes, trying to let the music envelop him. Angry music. Grunge.

Pearl Jam finished, Alanis Morissette came up next on his shuffle. The deal was, his mother would phone them here every second evening. That, Ned thought bitterly, was going to for sure keep her safe.

Doctors Without Borders was supposed to be respected and acknowledged everywhere, but they weren’t always, not any more. The world had changed. Places like Iraq had proven that, and the Sudan was real far from being the smartest place on earth to be right now.

He pulled off the buds again. Alanis complained a lot, he decided, for a girl from the Ottawa Valley who absolutely had it made.

“Gregorian chants?” someone asked.

Ned jerked sideways along the bench, turning his head quickly. “What the—”

“Sorry! Did I scare you?”

“Hell, yes!” he snapped. “What do you think?”

He stood up. It was a girl, he saw.

She looked apologetic for a second, then grinned. She clasped her hands in front of her. “What have you to fear in this holy place, my child? What sins lie heavy on your heart?”

“I’ll think of something,” he said.

She laughed.

She looked to be about his own age, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, Doc Martens, a small green backpack. Tall, thin, freckles, American accent. Light brown hair to her shoulders.

“Murder? T. S. Eliot wrote a play about that,” she said.

Ned made a face. Urk. One of those. “I know, Murder in the Cathedral. We’re supposed to study it next year.”

She grinned again. “I’m geeky that way. What can I say? Isn’t this place amazing?”

“You think? I think it’s a mess.”

“But that’s what’s cool! Walk twenty steps and you go five hundred years. Have you seen the baptistry? This place drips with history.”

Ned held out an open palm and looked up, as if to check for dripping water. “You are a geek, aren’t you?”

“Can’t tease if I admitted it. Cheap shot.”

She was kind of pretty, in a skinny-dancer way.

Ned shrugged. “What’s the baptistry?”

“The round part, by the front doors.”

“Wait a sec.” Something occurred to him. “How’d you get in? The place is closed for two hours.”

“I saw. Someone’s taking photos outside. Probably a brochure.”

“No.” He hesitated. “That’s my dad. For a book.”

“Really? Who is he?”

“You wouldn’t know. Edward Marriner.”

Her jaw actually dropped. Ned felt the familiar mix of pleasure and embarrassment. “You messing with me?” she gasped. “Mountains and Gods? I know that book. We own that book!”

“Well, cool. What will it get me?”

She gave him a suddenly shy look. Ned wasn’t sure why he’d spoken that way. It wasn’t really him. Ken and Barry talked that way to girls, but he didn’t, usually. He cleared his throat.

“Get you a lecture on the baptistry,” she said. “If you can stand it. I’m Kate. Not Katie, not Kathy.”

He nodded his head. “Ned. Not Seymour, not Abdul.”

She hesitated, then laughed again. “All right, fine, I deserved that. But I hate nicknames.”

“Kate is a nickname.”

“Yeah, but I picked it. Makes a difference.”

“I guess. You never answered…how’d you get in?”

“Side door.” She gestured across the way. “No one’s watching the square on that side. Through the cloister. Seen that yet?”

Ned blinked. But he couldn’t say, after, that any premonition had come to him. He was just confused, that’s all.

“The door to the cloister is locked. I was there fifteen minutes ago.”

“Nope. Open. The far one out to the street and the one leading in here. I just came through them. Come look. The cloister is really pretty.”

It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister. Not yet.

Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal. A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang.

“What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was. He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voice down.

Kate did the same. “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered. “Over there.” She pointed. “Probably one of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”

Another scraping sound.

Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”

It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister, walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix. Get a croissant and a Coke somewhere with this girl named Kate.

His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of an insanely dangerous place. Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t know that part yet.

He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round, pale space. He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized. He saw eight tall pillars, making a smaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else.

“It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him. “By a lot, like 500 a.d.”

He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had been lifted from over a hole in the stone floor.

Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate had covered. And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone who belonged in here.

The man had his back to them. Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed. Kate let out a gasp. The man in the pit didn’t move, and then he did.

With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything that could be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife. Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives.

The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction.

He still didn’t turn around. They couldn’t see his face. Ned saw long—very long—fingers. The man was bald, or had shaved his head. It was impossible to tell his age.

There was a silence; no one moved. This would be a good spot to save the game, Ned thought. Then restart if my character gets killed.

“He isn’t here,” the man said quietly. “I was quite sure…but he is playing with me again. He enjoys doing that.”

Ned Marriner had never heard that tone in a voice. It chilled him, standing in shadow, looking towards the soft light of the baptistry.

The man had spoken in French. Ned’s French was very good, after nine years of immersion classes at home in Montreal. He wondered about Kate, then realized she’d understood because, absurdly, as if making polite conversation—with a knife lying on the stone floor—she asked, in the same language, “Who isn’t here? There’s just a Roman street under there, right? It says so on the wall.”

The man ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t made any sounds that mattered in any way. Ned had a sense of a small man, but it was hard to tell, not knowing how deep the pit was. He still hadn’t turned to look at them. It was time to run, obviously. This wasn’t a computer game. He didn’t move.

“Go away,” the man said, as if sensing Ned’s thought. “I have killed children before. I have no strong desire to do so now. Go and sit somewhere else. I will be leaving now.”

Children? They weren’t kids.

Stupidly, Ned said, “We’ve seen you. We could tell people…”

A hint of amusement in his voice, the man said dryly, “Tell them what? That someone lifted a grate and looked at the Roman paving? Hélas ! All the gendarmes of France will be on the case.”

Ned might have grown up in too quick-witted a household, in some ways. “No,” he said, “we could say someone threatened us with a knife.”

The man turned around, inside the opening in the floor.

He was clean-shaven, lean-faced. Dark, strong eyebrows, a long, straight nose, a thin mouth. The bald head made his cheekbones show prominently. Ned saw a scar on one cheek, curving behind his ear.

The man looked at them both a moment, where they stood together at the top of the three steps, before he spoke again. His eyes were deep-set; it was impossible to see their colour.

“A few gendarmes would be interested in that, I grant you.” He shook his head. “But I am leaving. I see no reason to kill you. I will replace the grate. No damage has been done. To anything. Go away.” And then, as they still stood there, more in shock than anything else, he took the knife and put it out of sight.

Ned swallowed.

“Come on!” whispered the girl named Kate. She pulled at his arm. He turned with her to go. Then looked back.

“Were you trying to rob something down there?” he asked.

His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that.

The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No. Not that. I thought I was…here soon enough. I was wrong. I think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”

Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain. The words made so little sense it wasn’t even funny. Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time.

He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before. By Saint-Catherine’s chapel.

They sat down on the same bench. Neither of them spoke. Across the echoing, empty space of the dark cathedral they heard a clang and scrape, then a bang again. Then nothing. He’d be leaving now.

Ned looked down at the iPod on his belt. It seemed, just then, to be the strangest object imaginable. A small rectangle that offered music. Any kind of music you wanted. Hundreds of hours of it. With little white buds you could put in your ears and block out the sounds of the world.

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He looked over at the girl. She was biting her lower lip, staring straight ahead. Ned cleared his throat. It sounded loud. “Well, if Kate is for Katherine,” he said brightly, “we’re in the right place. You can do the praying.”

“What the…?” She looked at him.

He showed her the map, pointing to the name of the chapel. His bad joke.

“I’m not Catholic,” she said.

He shrugged. “I doubt that matters.”

“What…what do you think he was doing?” She’d seemed pretty confident, assertive, when she’d first come over to him. She didn’t seem that way now. She looked scared, which was reasonable.

Ned swore. He didn’t swear as much as some of the guys did, but this particular moment seemed to call for something. “I have no idea. What’s down there?”

“I think they’re just grates to let you look down and see the old Roman street. The tourist stuff on the wall also said there was a tomb, going back to the sixth century. But that’s something I…” She stopped. He stared at her.

“What?”

Kate sighed. “This is gonna sound geeky again, but I just like this stuff, okay? Don’t laugh at me?”

“I’m nowhere close to laughing.”

She said, “They didn’t bury people inside city walls back then. It was forbidden. That’s why there are catacombs and cemeteries in Rome and Paris and Arles and other places—outside the walls. They buried the dead outside.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, the info thing posted over there shows a tomb here from the sixth century. A little over from where…he was. So how did…well, how did someone get buried in here? Back then?”

“Shovels?” Ned said, more out of reflex than anything else.

She didn’t smile.

“You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked.

“I don’t think anything. Really. He said he wasn’t. But he also said…” She shook her head. “Can we go?”

Ned nodded. “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, and then me. He gets intense when he’s working.”

“We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”

A penny dropped for Ned. “Right. That’ll be how he got in, I bet. Between my seeing it locked and your finding the two doors open.”

“You think he’s gone out that way?”

“Long gone by now.” He hesitated. “Show me that baptistry first.”

“Are you crazy?”

“He’s gone, Kate.”

“But why do you…?”

Ned looked at her. “History lesson? You promised.”

She didn’t smile. “Why are you playing boy detective?”

He didn’t have a really good answer. “This is a bit too weird. I want to try to understand.”

“Ned, he said he’d killed children.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think…that means what we think it means.”

“And that sounds like a line from a bad movie.”

“Maybe. But come on.”

“This where the creepy music starts?”

“Come on, Kate.”

He got up and she followed. She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace of the villa that evening. They didn’t know each other at all that first morning. She could have gone out the way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased.

They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside that inner ring of pillars. The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming down through windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre.

Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate. If it was supposed to be a viewing point, it wasn’t much of one. It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go.

“Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said. She was at the west wall, in front of some tourist information, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood. Ned walked over. Basically, it was just another map-key to this part of the interior. Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed to it. As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century.

“And look at this,” she said.

She was pointing to an alcove on their left. Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cow and below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment. He could make out a small bird, part of some much larger work. The rest of it was worn away.

“These are even older,” Kate said.

“What was this place, before? Where we are?”

“The forum was here. Centre of town. The Roman city was founded about a hundred and something years b.c. by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts. He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae. Aquae, because of the waters. There were hot springs until recently. That’s why there are so many fountains. Have you seen them?”

“We just got here. The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”

“Uh-huh. There’s a sketch of it on the wall. Where your dad is now was like the major intersection of the Roman town. That’s why…that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here, back then.”

“Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”

She looked dubious. “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”

“Google it later, or I will.”

“Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it. Ned could relate.

He shook his head again. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why. He looked at that faded bull on the wall. It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew. This place was really old. He shivered. And perhaps because of that, because he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.

It was heavier than he’d expected. He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’d heard before. The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw. He just had to lift and slide, but…

“Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”

“Are you insane?”

“No…but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t…”

She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over. There was an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through.

“You are not going down there,” Kate said. “I am not staying to watch—”

“I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her. And then, before he had time to think about it and get really frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the pit, turned so he was facing the side, and lowered himself. Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or rats skittering through the dark, ancient space below. Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided.

His feet touched bottom and he let go. He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes.

“You wouldn’t by any chance have—”

“Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment. She handed him a small red metal flashlight. “I keep one in my pack. For walks at night.”

“Efficient of you. Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned on the beam.

“You going to bother telling me why you are doing this?” she asked, from above.

“Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully.

He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him. He knelt. The slabs were damp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been.

On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate. Straight ahead the flashlight lit the short distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course. He saw worn steps. The beam picked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing. There were spiderwebs entangling it.

No snakes, no rats. Yet.

To his left the space opened into a corridor.

He’d been expecting that, actually. That was the way back towards the main part of the cathedral, where the placard on the wall had said a tomb would be. Ned took a deep breath.

“Remember,” he said, “the iPod’s yours. Don’t delete the Led Zep, or Coldplay.”

He bent low, because he had to. He didn’t get very far, maybe twenty steps. It didn’t go farther. It just hit another wall. He’d be right under the first nave here, he thought. The roof was really low.

His flashlight beam played along the rough, damp surface in front of him. It was sealed, closed off. Nothing that even vaguely resembled a tomb. It looked like there were just the two corridors: from the grate to the well, and this one.

“Where are you?” Kate called.

“I’m okay. It’s closed up. There’s nothing here. Like he said. Maybe this whole opening was just for getting down to fix the pipes. Plumbing. Bet there are other pipes, and more grates around the other side of the well.”

“I’ll go look,” she called. “Does this mean I don’t get the iPod?”

Ned laughed, startling himself as the sound echoed.

And it was then, as he turned to go back, that the bright, narrow beam of Kate’s flashlight, playing along the corridor, illuminated a recessed space, a niche cut in the stone wall, and Ned saw what was resting in it.

CHAPTER II

He didn’t touch it. He wasn’t that brave, or that stupid. The hairs were actually standing up on the back of his neck.

“Another grate,” Kate called cheerfully from above. “Maybe you were right. Maybe after they covered up the Roman street they just needed—”

“I found something,” he said.

His voice sounded strained, unnatural. The flashlight beam wavered. He tried to hold it steady but the movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now. Another recess. The same thing in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t. Not quite the same.

“Found? What do you mean?” Kate called.

Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from a world he’d left behind when he came down here. He couldn’t answer. He was actually unable to speak. He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other.

The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was a human skull.

He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously set here to be seen. This wasn’t a burial. The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in her travels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda.

This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest.

The second object made that even clearer. In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside the first, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head.

It was smooth, worn down, as if with age. The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had been decapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck. It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him across centuries: a message he really didn’t want to understand. In some ways it frightened him even more than the bones. He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”

He’d never seen anything like this carving. Someone had gone to great pains to get down here, hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere. And the meaning was…what?

“What is it?” Kate called. “Ned, you’re scaring me.”

He still couldn’t answer her. His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming. Then, forcing himself to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head was completely smooth on the top, as if bald. And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear.

He got out of there, as fast as he could.

they sat in the cloister in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench. Ned hadn’t been sure how much farther he could walk before sitting down.

There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure. It was bright with springtime flowers in the small, quiet garden. They were close to the door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.

His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.

He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.

“Tell me,” said Kate.

She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.

“Oh, God,” she said.

Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.

“What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the…the archaeologists?”

Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”

“What do you mean? You said…”

“I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do. They’ll have gone looking at those…Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”

“The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”

“Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and…and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”

“Oh, God,” she said again.

She looked at him. In the light he could 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 him. It didn’t matter. Same voice.

Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run.

“Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”

“I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”

It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.

His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.

The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”

“You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.

“I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”

Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”

“You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”

Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.

“I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.

“Someone might have liked it to be.”

Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who…who was the model for her, then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.

Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.

“I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.

“I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”

Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this…feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”

After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do…” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not…this story is not important for you.”

Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”

“No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best, whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”

“Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.

“What?” cried Kate again.

In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.

“How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you?”

He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.

But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.

Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.

“Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “I don’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”

“Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”

“I know,” he said.

The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”

They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”

“I believe that,” Ned said.

“This is still not for you. You have no idea of what…you have no role. I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”

Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us…do anything?”

A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.

“Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.

The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.

“Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”

They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.

The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.

“Wait!”

It was Kate this time.

The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.

“Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.

He did turn, after all, at that.

He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.

“Not yet,” he said.

Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.

They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.

Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him.

From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving. People said she was the Queen of Sheba. It was posted that way on the wall. How did he know they were wrong? It was ridiculous.

Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of the corners were. This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top. It was done in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman.

Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if he understood properly—hundreds of years after that. He stared at it, almost angrily.

“What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded.

Kate cleared her throat. “New Testament. Symbol of St. Luke.”

Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him.

“I doubt it,” he said finally. “Not this one. Not the old one inside, either.”

“What are you saying now?”

He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same. Maybe they were kids. Someone had pointed a knife towards them. And that was almost the least of it.

He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again. Pale-coloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Barely anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’d been loved.

And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother. He shook his head.

“I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s get out of here.”

“Need a drink, Detective?”

He managed a smile. “Coke will do fine.”

kate knew where she was going. She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café a few minutes from the cathedral.

Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had to admit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school in New York City and one here in Aix. Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was with the girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer.

Her last name was Wenger. She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both. She wanted to teach, or maybe study law. Or both. She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed something like that). She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did, but was pretty good. She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with. Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him.

“It sucks, lying for her,” she said. “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”

“Sounds like a babe, though. Got her phone number?”

Kate made a face. “You aren’t even close to serious.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”

That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid.

Ned didn’t say anything. He sipped his drink and looked around. The long, narrow café had two small tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door. The morning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones.

“Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment. “That was a weird thing to say.”

He shrugged. “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture. Or what happened.”

She was biting at her lip again.

“Why was he…our guy…why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have been the font, something about the water?”

Ned shook his head. “Don’t think so. The skull and the carved head were the other way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate…if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”

She nodded her head. “Sure.”

“So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”

Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”

“I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”

“But you said he made that carving in the cloister. You do know how old that thing is?”

“Look, forget what I said there. I was a bit out of it.”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “You weren’t. When he came down from the roof I thought he was going to kill you. And then he said when it was done.”

He sighed. “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said.

“It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling.

“Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”

“She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages. Am I bugging you?”

“No. Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”

Kate still didn’t smile. “Something did happen to you back there.”

“Yeah. I’m all right now. Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh. “Wanna make out?”

She ignored that, which was what it deserved. “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with…I don’t know.”

He nodded. “That’s it. Something to do with I don’t know.”

He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with a girl from New York, from now, drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over.

In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t. He wasn’t going to say that, though.

He looked at his watch. “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated. This part was tricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him. “You got a phone number? We can keep in touch?”

She smiled. “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”

“Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a deal-breaker.”

She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiral-bound agenda she pulled from her pack and scribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number. Ned took from his wallet the card on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the house phone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies. She’d put a little smiley face at the bottom.

When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him their latitude and longitude.

He read Kate the villa number. She wrote it down.

“You have school tomorrow?”

She nodded. “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow. I’m there till five. Meet here after? Can you find it?”

He nodded. “Easy. Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”

She did laugh this time, after a second.

They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside. He watched her walk away through the morning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousand years ago.

CHAPTER III

The morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back. He helped Steve and Greg load the van. They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from the police, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away.

The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable. That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially at the start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first morning. He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.

Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table. “Anything inside I need to know about?”

Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on a shoot. When Ned was a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way. He felt important, included. More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied. In fact, “more recently” extended right up to this morning, he realized.

Something had changed. He said, “Not too much, I don’t think. Pretty dark, hard to find angles. Like you said, it’s all jumbled. You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in. There’s light there and it is really old. Way older than the rest.” He hesitated. “The cloister was open, I got a look in there, too.”

“The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin. For someone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought.

“Whatever. This one looked good,” he said. “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but if you don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said, “There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff. Saints on the four corners. One sculpture’s supposed to be the Queen of Sheba. She’s really worn away, but have a look.”

His father stroked his brown moustache. Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashioned handlebar moustache. It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with two upward moustache curves. People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife liked the look, and that was that.

Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow. We’ve got two more hours cleared so I’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to do them again. Will I need lights?”

“Inside? For sure,” Ned said. “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up. Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”

“Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said. “They’ll have power.”

“The baptistry’s off to one side.”

“Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling. Bearded Greg made a face at Ned. Steve just grinned. Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemed engaged, and she saw that as part of her job.

Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside. Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheer routine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened. It might bring the place back to now…from wherever it had been this morning.

It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew he wanted it. He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’t about to do that.

His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when he was here. Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the Romans had discovered. Kate Wenger had just told him about those. She just about forced you to call her a geek, that girl.

For the book, Ned’s father had to balance the things he wanted to photograph with pictures that matched Lee’s text. That was partly Barrett Reinhardt’s job: to merge the work of two important men in a big project. His idea, apparently, was to have smaller black-and-white pictures tucked into the text that Lee had written, along with Marriner’s full-page or double-page colour shots.

Ned didn’t feel like looking at fountains. He knew what he did need to do. Greg was going back up to the villa to upload the digitals from this morning and check them on the monitor. He was also going to confirm by phone the arrangements for shooting in Arles, about an hour away, the day after tomorrow.

Melanie handed Greg detailed instructions about that, printed in her usual green ink. Ned saw a smiley face at the bottom of the card. He was pleased to see he wasn’t the only one she did that to.

He rode back with Greg in the van, changed into a faded-out grey T-shirt, and shorts, clipped on his water bottle and pedometer, put the iPod in its armband, and went for a run. He had essays to write here, and a training log to complete for his track coach. Both were homework, really.

The running was better.

Melanie had told him the night before that if he went down their laneway and turned right at the road instead of left towards town, then kept going as it curved back uphill, he’d end up eventually where the road ended at some area where people biked and jogged in the countryside. She said there was supposed to be an old tower up there to look at.

It irritated him, as usual, that she was organized to the point of planning his training routes, but he had no better idea where to go, and there wasn’t a good reason not to try that path.

It was a steep downhill on their little road past the other villas, and then steadily back up for a long, winding way along the ridge above. Up-and-down was good, of course. Ned ran on the cross-country team, this was what he needed.

He’d begun to think he’d gone wrong before he finally came to the car barrier. On the other side of it he found the trail. There were arrows on a wooden pole pointing one way towards a village called Vauvenargues and in the other direction to that tower Melanie had mentioned. Someone went by on a mountain bike towards Vauvenargues. Ned went the other way.

The tower wasn’t far. The trail continued down and around it towards the northern edges of Aix, it looked like. Ned didn’t like to stop during a run, no one did, but the view from up here was pretty cool and so was the round, ruined lookout tower. He wondered how old it was.

This whole place was just saturated in the past, he thought. Layers and layers of it. It could get to you, one way or another. He took off the earbuds and drank some water.

There was a low, really lame fence around the tower. A sign said it was dangerous to cross and a bigger fence had been authorized and was coming, but there was no one in sight now so Ned went over the railing and then he bent and stepped into the tower through a crumbled opening in the honey-coloured stones.

It was dark inside after the sunlight. There was no door anywhere, just the one broken opening. He looked up in a high, empty space. He could see the sky a long way above, a small circle of blue-black. It was as if he were at the bottom of a well. There were probably bats, he thought. There must have been a stairway once, winding up, but there was nothing now. He wondered what this had guarded against, what they’d been watching for up here.

He felt himself cooling down too much in the shade, not good. You pulled muscles that way. He stepped back into the sunshine, blinking, and gazed down at the city. There was an aqueduct in the distance, on the far side of Aix, vividly clear. After a moment, Ned spotted the bell tower of the cathedral in the middle of town, and that brought him back to this morning. He was nowhere close to wanting that.

He turned and started running again, back the way he’d come, but with the stop and cooling down and jet lag, he had lost his rhythm. He found it harder going than he should have, past the car barrier and downhill now along the road. It was a good jogging route, though, had to give Melanie credit. Next time he could go the other way at the signpost, keep going, log his proper distance.

He was halfway back up their own steep road, leading to Villa Sans Souci at the top, when he realized something.

He stopped running, having actually shocked himself.

Why now? he had said, and the man in the grey leather jacket hadn’t replied. Maybe Ned had an answer, after all. Maybe it even mattered, for the first time, that when she was alive his grandmother had told him some of her old stories.

Ned walked thoughtfully up the last part of the hill and punched the gate code to get onto the property. He paced up and down the terrace for a bit, stretching. He thought about jumping in the pool, but it wasn’t that warm, and he went upstairs and showered instead, dropping his clothes in the hamper for the cleaning help. The villa had been rented with two women to work for them. Both were named Vera, which made for challenges. Greg had named them Veracook and Veraclean.

Pulling on his jeans, Ned went down and into the kitchen. He got a Coke from the fridge. Veracook, clad in black, grey hair pulled tightly in a bun, was there. She had baked some kind of hard biscuits. He took one. From by the stove, she smiled approval.

Greg was on his cellphone in front of the computer in the dining room, so the house line was free. Ned went back upstairs and into his father’s bedroom and dialed the mobile number Kate Wenger had given him.

“Bonjour?”

“Um, hi, I’m looking for Marie-Chantal.”

“Screw you, Ned.” But she laughed. “Miss me already? How sweet.”

He felt himself flush, was glad she couldn’t see it. “I just came in from a run. Um, I realized something.”

“That you did miss me? I’m flattered.” She was sassy on the phone, he thought. He wondered how she was on IM or texting. Everyone got looser online.

“No, listen. Um, it’s April thirtieth on Thursday. Then May Day.”

Kate was silent. He was wondering if he’d have to explain, then heard her say, “Jeez, Ned. Beltaine? That’s a major deal. Ghosts and souls, like Hallowe’en. How do you know this? You a closet nerd?”

“My mom’s family’s from Wales. My grandmother told me some of this stuff. We used to go on a picnic sometimes, on the first of May.”

“Want to go on a picnic?”

“If you bring Marie-Chantal.” He hesitated. “Kate, where were the Celts around here? Were they here?”

“Yeah, they were. I can find out where.”

“I can, too, I guess.”

“No, you leave the heavy lifting to me, Grasshopper. You just keep running and hopping. See you tomorrow after school?”

“See you.” He hung up, grinning in spite of himself. It was nice, he thought, to meet a girl in a situation where he didn’t have to explain her, or what was going down, to the other guys. Privacy, that was the thing. You didn’t get a lot of it back home.

they had dinner at the villa, French time: after eight o’clock. The clear understanding, Melanie explained seriously, was that they had to eat here every so often or Veracook would get insulted and depressed (“Veradepressed!” Greg said) and start burning their food and stuff like that.

Before they ate, Ned’s father took a vodka and tonic out on the terrace while the others went into the pool. Melanie, tiny as she was, looked pretty good in a bathing suit, Ned decided. She made a big deal about the water being freezing cold (it was) but got herself in. Steve was a swimmer, had the long arms and legs. He was methodically doing laps, or trying to—the pool wasn’t really big enough.

As Ned and his father sat watching them, Greg suddenly burst through the terrace doors, sprang down the wide stone steps, across the grass, and cannonballed into the water, wearing the baggiest, most worn-out bathing suit Ned had ever seen.

Edward Marriner, laughing, offered an immediate pay bonus if Greg promised to use their next coffee break to buy a new swimsuit in town and spare them the sight of this one again. Melanie shouted a suggestion that Greg could skinny-dip if he wanted to save the money. Greg, splashing and whooping in the frigid water, threatened to take her up on it.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

“And why not?”

Melanie laughed. “Shrinkage in cold water. Male pride. End of story.”

“You have,” Greg said after a moment, “a point.” Steve, who had stopped his laps, laughed aloud.

Up on the terrace, Ned looked at his father and they exchanged a smile.

“You okay so far?” his dad asked.

“I’m good.”

A small hesitation. “Mom’ll call tomorrow.”

“I know.”

They looked at the others in the water. “Veracook will have decided they are insane,” Edward Marriner said.

“She’d have figured it out eventually,” said Ned.

They left it at that. They didn’t talk a whole lot these days. Ned had overheard a couple of his parents’ conversations at night about “fifteen years old” and “mood swings.” It had made him think about being totally affectionate for a couple of weeks, just to mess with their heads, but it felt like too much work.

Ned didn’t mind his father, though. It got old after a while watching people go drop-jawed, the way Kate Wenger had, when they learned who he was, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. Mountains and Gods was one of the best-selling photography books of the past ten years, and Passageways, though less flashy (it didn’t have the Himalayas, his dad used to say), had won awards all over the place. His father was one of the few people who took pictures for both Vanity Fair and National Geographic. You had to admit that was cool, if only to yourself.

When the others came shivering out of the pool to dry off, Melanie said, “Hold it a sec. Forgot something.”

“What? You? Forget?” Steve said. His yellow hair was standing up in all directions. “No possible way!”

She stuck out her tongue at him, and disappeared inside. Her room was the only bedroom on the main floor. She came dripping back out, still wrapped in her towel, with another one around her hair now. She was holding a bag that said “France Telecom.” She dropped it on the table in front of Ned.

“In case Ground Control needs to reach Major Tom,” she said.

She’d gotten him a cellphone. It was, Ned decided, easy to be irritated with tiny Melanie and her hyper-efficiency, but it was kind of hard not to appreciate her.

“Thanks,” he said. “Really.”

Melanie handed him another of her index cards, with his new phone number written out in green on it, above another smiley face. “It has a camera, too. The package is open,” she added, as he pulled out the box and the fliptop phone. “I programmed all our numbers for you.”

Ned sighed. It was too easy to be irritated with her, he amended, inwardly. “I could have done that,” he said mildly. “I actually passed cellphone programming last year.”

“I did it in the cab coming back up here,” she said. “I have fast fingers.” She winked.

“Oh, ho!” said Greg, chortling.

“Be silent, baggy suit,” Melanie said to him. “Unless you are going to tell me that Arles is up and running.”

“Up and run your fast fingers over my baggy suit and I’ll tell you.”

Ned’s father shook his head and sipped his drink. “You’re making me feel old,” he said. “Stop it.”

“The house line is 1, your dad’s 2, I’m 3, Steven’s 4. Greg is star-pound key-star-865-star-pound-7,” Melanie said sweetly.

Ned had to laugh. Even Greg did. Melanie grinned triumphantly, and went back in to shower and change. Greg and Steve stayed out for a beer, drying off in the mild evening light. Greg said it was warmer on the terrace than in the pool.

It wasn’t even May yet, Ned’s father pointed out. The French didn’t start swimming until June, usually. There was water in the villa’s pool only as a courtesy to their idiocy. The sun was west, over the city. There was a shining to the air; the trees were brilliant.

A moment later, the serenity of that Provençal sunset was shattered by a startling sound. Then it came again. After a brain-cramp moment, Ned recognized it: the tune from Disneyland’s kiddie ride, “It’s a Small World.”

The four of them looked around. Their gazes fell, collectively, upon Ned’s new phone on the table. Warily, he picked it up, flipped it open, held it to his ear.

“Forgot to mention,” Melanie said from her own mobile in the house. He heard her trying not to laugh. “I programmed a ringtone for you, too. Tried to find something suitable.”

“This,” Ned said grimly into the phone, “means war. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, Ned!” she giggled, “I thought you’d like it!” She hung up.

Ned put the phone down on the glass tabletop. He looked out for a second at the lavender bushes planted beyond the cypresses and the pool, and then at the three men around the table. They were each, including his father, struggling to keep a straight face. When he looked at them, they gave up, toppling into laughter.

he couldn’t sleep.

How unsurprising, Ned thought, punching his pillow for the twentieth time and flipping it over again. Jet lag would be part of it, on this second night overseas. They were six hours ahead of Montreal. It was supposed to take a day for each hour before you adjusted. Unless you were an airline pilot or something.

But it wasn’t really the time difference and he knew it. He checked the clock by the bed again: almost three in the morning. The dead of night. On April 30 that might have another meaning, Ned thought.

He’d have to remember to tell that one to Kate Wenger later today. She’d get the joke. If he could keep his eyes open by then, the way tonight was going.

He got up and went to the window, which was open to the night air. He had the middle bedroom of the three upstairs. His dad was in the master, Greg and Steve shared the last one.

He pulled back the curtain. His window was over the terrace, looking out at the pool and the lavender bushes and a clump of trees on the slope by the roadway. If he leaned out and looked to his right, he could see Aix’s lights glowing in the distance. The moon was orangered, hanging over the city, close to full. He saw the summer triangle above him. Even with moonlight, the stars were a lot brighter than they were in Westmount, in the middle of Montreal.

He wondered how they looked above Darfur right now. His mom would phone this evening—or tomorrow evening—whatever you said when it was 3:00 a.m.

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but how did you control what you thought about, anyhow? Especially at this hour, half awake. The mind just…went places. Don’t think about pink elephants, or girls’ breasts, or when they wore skirts and uncrossed their legs. Sometimes in math class he’d wander off in his thoughts for a run, or think about music, or a movie he’d seen, or what some girl he’d never met had typed privately to him in a chatroom the night before. If it was a girl: there was always that to worry about online. His friend Doug was totally paranoid about it.

You thought about a lot of different things, minute by minute, through a day. Sometimes late at night you thought about a skull and a sculpted head in a corridor underground.

And that was going to be so helpful in getting to sleep, Ned knew. So would brooding about what had happened inside him this morning.

After another minute, irresolute, he made an attempt to access, locate—whatever word would suit—that place within himself again. The place where he’d somehow sensed the presence of the lean, nameless man on the roof above them. And where he had grasped another thing he had no proper way of knowing: that the person up there, today—right here, right now—had made the eight-hundred-year-old carving they’d been looking at.

Kate had been right, of course: the man’s response, hurtling down to confront them, white with rage, had told them what they needed to know.

But Ned couldn’t feel anything inside now, couldn’t find whatever he was looking for. He didn’t know if that was because it was over—a totally weird flicker of strangeness in the cloister—or if it was because there was nothing to find at this moment, looking out over dark grass and water and cypress trees in the night.

There wasn’t a whole lot of point standing here in sleep shorts thinking about it. He decided to go down for a glass of juice. On the way downstairs, barefoot in a sleeping house, he had an idea. A good one, actually. When you couldn’t do anything about the strange, hard things, you did what you could in other ways.

He had warned Melanie, after all.

She, the ever-efficient one, had rigged up a multi-charger station for all the mobile phones on the sideboard in the dining room. She had even been helpful enough to label everyone’s slot. In green ink.

It was almost too easy.

Working quickly through the options on each phone, Ned cheerfully changed Greg’s ring to the theme from “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and showed no mercy for Steve, innocent bystander though he might have been, rejigging his cell to play “The Teletubbies Song.” He left his father’s alone.

Then he took his time, scrolling thoughtfully through the choices on Melanie’s phone a couple of times before deciding.

Afterwards, pleased with himself and his contribution to justice in the world, he went and got his juice from the kitchen. He took it out on the terrace, standing shirtless in the night. It was cold now. His mother would have made him get a shirt or a robe if she’d been up. If she’d been here.

He tried, one more time, to see if he could find something within himself, feel attuned to anything. Nothing there. He looked out across the landscape and saw only night: pool and woods and grass to the south under stars. A low moon west. He heard an owl behind him. There were trees all around the villa, plenty of room for nests, and hunting.

As it happens, he is being watched.

In the small stand of trees beside the lavender bushes, the figure observing him has long ago learned how to keep from being sensed in any of the ways Ned Marriner might know or discover by searching inside himself.

Certain skills and knowledge are part of his heritage. Others have taken time and considerable effort. He has had time, and has never been fazed by difficulty.

He’d seen the boy appear at the open window upstairs, and then, a little later, watched him come outside, half naked, vulnerable and alone. The observing figure is amused by this, by almost all that has happened today, but he does think about killing him.

It is almost too easy.

Because of the day that is coming he holds himself in check. If you are in the midst of shaping something urgently awaited, you do not give way to impulses like this, however satisfying they might be. He is impulsive by nature, but hardly a fool. He has lived too long for that.

The boy, he has decided, is random, trivial, an accident, not anyone or anything that matters. And it is not a good idea to cause any disturbance now, among either the living or the spirits, some of them already beginning to stir. He knows about the spirits. He is waiting for them, diverting himself as best he can while he does so.

He lets the boy go back inside, alive and inconsequential.

The impulse to kill is still strong, however. He recognizes it, knows why it is building. When that desire comes, it is difficult to put away unslaked. He has found that to be so over time and is disinclined to deny himself.

He changes again—the skill he took so long in mastering—and goes hunting. Moonlight briefly finds his wings in flight, then they are lost again, entering the woods.

CHAPTER IV

When Ned came down to the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed from his disrupted sleep, the others had already gone into town. Second work session at the cathedral. There was a note from Melanie that said they’d be back by lunchtime. He’d neglected to put on a shirt and Veraclean, in the adjacent laundry room, smiled at him before pointedly glancing away. He’d forgotten about her. He quickly drank some orange juice and went back upstairs to dress.

Then he phoned Melanie.

Three rings.

“Yes?” A really frosty tone for one word, he thought. Impressive.

“Hi there!” he said cheerfully.

“Ned Marriner,” she said, low and intense, “you are in so much trouble. You have no idea. You are pushing up daisies, meeting your Maker, joining the choir.” He heard her beginning to laugh, fighting it.

“Damn!” he said. “I’m talented after all.”

“Talented and dead. Sleeping with the fishes.”

“But, Melanie!” he protested. “I’d thought you’d like it!”

“‘The Wedding March’? ‘The Wedding March’ as a ringtone? We’re in a goddamned cathedral! Greg is in hysterics. He’s holding a pillar to stay upright. He is peeing on it! You will be made to suffer!”

She sounded pleasingly hysterical herself. It was all very satisfying.

“I’m sure. In the meantime, you might want to phone Steve and Greg when you get a chance.”

She paused, lowered her voice. “Really? You got them, too?”

“Got them, too. See you at lunch.”

He hung up, grinning.

On considered reflection, he decided to keep his new phone hidden away for the next little while. There wasn’t much he could do if she decided to short-sheet his bed, but he doubted she’d like garden snails in hers, and an offhand mention of the possibility might stave off retaliation. He thought he could handle Greg and Steve. Melanie was the challenge.

He loafed around the house for the morning, energetically avoiding any thought of the papers he was supposed to be writing. He was still jet-lagged, wasn’t he? Who could possibly be expected to write an English or history essay while time-warped?

Despite what Kate Wenger had said, he spent a bit of time online googling Celts+Provence, and scribbled a few notes. Then he went outside in the bright morning and listened to music on the terrace till he saw the van making its way up the hill to the villa gates.

He took off the iPod and put it on the table. He had a premonition of what was coming. He sat up in the lounger and waved an enthusiastic hello to everyone. His father waved back from the driveway. Melanie stood by the van, hands on hips, trying to achieve a withering glare—which was hard when you were barely five feet tall, Ned thought.

Greg and Steve, smiling benignly, came up to the terrace together. Still smiling, they grabbed Ned by hands and legs (pretty strong guys, both of them) and began lugging him down the steps and across the grass to the pool.

“SpongeBob, spare me!” Ned cried, perhaps unwisely.

He heard Melanie and his father laugh, which was pleasing, but by then he was flying.

It was cold in the pool, it was really cold in the pool. Gasping and coughing, Ned surfaced. He knew what to say. There were time-honoured male ways of responding to this.

“Ahh,” he said. “Very refreshing. Thank you so much, guys.”

ned carefully mentioned snails, over lunch outside—how he’d heard they had a creepy habit of ending up in people’s beds here, especially in springtime.

Interestingly, it was Steve who grew thoughtful, hearing that. Melanie pretended to treat it as a dubious piece of misinformation. It was hard to tell if she was faking or not.

Ned’s father, in a surprisingly relaxed state, said he’d shot some potentially workable images in the baptistry, shooting towards the dome with soft flash bounces. They’d also done some of the columns in the cloister, and a zigzag pattern he’d noticed out there on the walkway. Ned hadn’t seen that, but he didn’t have his father’s eye, and he’d been just a bit unsettled the day before out there.

“I really liked your Queen of Sheba,” his father said. “The colour’s gorgeous. Like amber from some angles. We’ll check the images later. But I think I’m going to want to have her. I’ll go back if I need to before we go home, maybe try late in the day, too. Two good calls, Ned.”

He was meeting Oliver Lee at a café in town this afternoon, just the two of them, first actual encounter. Barrett, the art director, was coming over from New York next week and had wanted to be there, but both men had decided to get together without an intermediary.

“I may or may not like him, but it doesn’t matter in the end. We don’t have to work together.”

“And you know he’ll love you?” Ned grinned.

The cold water had woken him up pretty effectively. Long-lost cure for jet lag: freezing pools.

“Everyone loves me,” Edward Marriner said. “Even my son.”

“Your son,” said Melanie, darkly, “is a terrible person.”

“Really,” Greg agreed, shaking his head.

Steve kept quiet, possibly thinking about snails in his bed. Ned decided he was going to have to do the snail thing at some point, and live with the consequences.

it turned out the three others were going to drop his father in town then drive east towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Paul Cézanne had apparently painted, like a hundred times. The painter had been born and died here. He was Aix’s main celebrity and he’d made the mountain famous.

Ned remembered his father grumbling about Cézanne on the flight over, leafing through Barrett Reinhardt’s notes: how it was almost impossible to get a picture of that mountain that wasn’t a cliché or some sentimental tribute to the painter. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but Barrett had said it was simply not possible to be in Provence working on a book of photographs and not shoot that peak. Especially if you were Edward Marriner and known for your mountainscapes.

“Simply not possible,” his dad had repeated on the plane, imitating the art director’s voice.

This afternoon’s drive would be partly an outing in the country, and partly to check some places Barrett had marked on local maps as where they might set up. Ned’s father would make that call himself, but the others were good at eliminating locations they knew he wouldn’t go for.

“You coming?” Steve asked Ned.

“Ah, I have to be in town by five-ish, actually. I’m meeting someone.”

“Who? What? How?” Greg demanded. “We just got here!”

Ned sighed. “I met a girl yesterday morning. We’re having a Coke.”

“Holy-moly,” said Melanie, grinning.

Greg was staring. “A date? Already? Jeez, the boy’s a man among men!”

“Don’t rush him, or me,” Edward Marriner said. “I feel old enough as is.”

“We’ll get you back in time,” Melanie said, checking her watch. “But change into running shoes, Ned, we may climb a bit. Sandals are no good.”

“Okay. But will you tie my shoelaces for me?” Ned asked. Melanie grinned again. He was glad the subject had changed. This date thing was not something he was easy with.

They dropped his father in Aix and then took the ring road around the city and headed into the countryside along a winding route Melanie said Cézanne used to walk along to find places to paint.

It was a fair distance to the mountain if you were on foot. Ned thought about that: in the nineteenth century, the Middle Ages, Roman times, people walked, or rode donkeys or something, and the road would have been way rougher. Everything was farther, slower, back then.

And at the beginning of the twenty-first century here they were, cruising these curves in an air-conditioned Renault van, and they’d be out by the mountain in twenty minutes or something and then back in the middle of town in time for him to meet Kate Wenger.

Cézanne, or the priests who had paced the worn walkway of yesterday’s cloister, or those long-ago medieval students who’d prayed in the cathedral and then gone across the square to lectures, they had all moved through worlds with different speeds than this one—even if the students were late for class, and running. Ned wasn’t sure what all of that meant, but it meant something. Maybe he’d put it in an essay—when he decided to think about his essays.

It was a brilliantly bright afternoon; they were all wearing sunglasses. Melanie’s were enormous, hiding half her face; Steve’s blond hair and tiny round shades made him look like a Russian revolutionary. Greg looked like a nightclub bouncer.

Ned, on impulse, took his shades off. He decided he wanted to see this landscape the way people had seen it long ago. He felt a bit silly, but only a bit. He thought about that round tower yesterday above the city, men on watch there, looking out this way.

He didn’t know what they’d have been gazing east to see, squinting into a rising sun, but someone had feared danger from this direction or they wouldn’t have built the tower there, would they? A more dangerous world than today’s, he thought. Unless you were in the Sudan, say.

He looked out the window, trying to keep his mind here, not let it drift that way to Africa, across the Mediterranean. Not so far away, in fact.

Beside him in the middle row of the van, Melanie leaned over and whispered, “Your dad was really pleased with your two ideas, you know. He spent a lot of time getting the baptistry shots.”

“He always takes his time,” Ned said. “Don’t try to flatter your way out of doom, woman. This is war. Think about snails in your bed.”

Melanie shrugged. “I like escargot. And actually, if I compare the prospect to some of the men I’ve dated…”

Ned laughed. But then he felt kind of young, again. He also thought, not for the first time, that women could be awfully strange. If the men had been so dorky, why’d she date them, why sleep with them? He looked sidelong at Melanie, almost asked her. If they’d been alone he might have; whatever else you could say about her, Melanie wasn’t evasive. She was funny and direct. And she didn’t actually treat him like a kid, just as part of her job. She’d have answered, he guessed. He might have learned something. He was getting to an age where a few things needed to be figured out, one way or another.

“There we are!” Steve said, pointing. “Target acquired.”

Their first clear glimpse of the peak, the upper part of it, above the pine trees between. The road curved again, they lost sight of the mountain, then got it again at the next switchback. Greg pulled over, put on the flashers, and they sat and looked. The triangle of the western face of the Sainte-Victoire rose commandingly above the plain and trees.

“Well, this is a ‘Cézanne Was Here’ kind of shot,” Melanie said dubiously. “We could probably get permission from the owners of one of these houses to set up on their property.” They’d passed a number of villas on the road.

“Okay, so, yeah, we know we can do this. What else is there, if the Man wants to go another way?” Greg said. He didn’t sound excited either.

“That’s why we’re driving,” said Steve.

Greg pulled back onto the road. After another few minutes winding back and forth they approached a village and saw a dead-straight double row of trees along another road meeting theirs from the right. A sign said “Le Tholonet.” There was a chateau on their left. It looked like a government building now, with a parking lot in front.

“Stop a sec,” Steve said. Greg pulled to the side. Steve put his window down, took off his own sunglasses, eyeballing those trees.

“Plane trees,” Melanie said. “They’re all over down here, to protect the fields and vineyards from the wind.”

“Ze mistral ! Ze mistral !” Greg cried, in mock-horror. “She has nevair been zo bad as zis year, mes amis! And ze wolves…!”

“Paradise has curses,” Melanie said. “The wind is one of them here. And that is a terrible accent, Gregory.” She was laughing, though. She had a nice laugh, Ned thought. Nice smile, too. But they were still at war. Mercy was for wimps.

Melanie leaned towards Ned’s side, looking out his window. “Steve, what are you thinking?”

“Long shot from the top of that straight road? They’re pretty gorgeous. Barrett didn’t mark any of these, did he? Move us up a bit, Greg?”

After Greg did, Steve took out a pocket camera and ripped a couple of fast digitals. Quality didn’t matter in these, Ned knew; they were just to let his father have a glance at what they were talking about.

Steve said, looking back at Melanie, “You say there are others like this? Maybe we check some out later? Ask around, where the best ones are. Is there anywhere the sun might set or rise along them? That might be—”

“Uh-huh,” Greg said. He had pulled right off the road again, to where they could look along the double aisle of green. “Good thought. East-west, most of these. The big wind’s north.”

Ned, impressed, reminded himself that his father’s people were always going to be competent, really good at their jobs, even if they might wear ridiculous swim trunks or write notes in green ink, with smiley faces at the bottom.

The line of plane trees marched away from them, evenly spaced, framing the road on both sides, the spring leaves making a canopy above.

He looked at them a moment out his rolled-down window, then shook his head. “Sorry, but you won’t get a sunset or sunrise,” he said. “Too many leaves by now, guys. That’s a winter shot.”

Greg and Steve slowly turned around together in the front seat and stared at him.

“Scawy,” said Greg. “Vewy scawy! What if he turns out to be like his old man? Imagine two of them. And he’s already picked up a chick here! I think I’m going to make Ned my new hero.”

Steve laughed. “Replacing SpongeBob? That’s a major commitment!”

“Wait till you see him on Rollerblades,” said Melanie.

Ned shook his head at that one. Ack. What did you do with someone like Melanie? “Right,” he said. “I blade just like my dad.”

Greg laughed and started the car again while Melanie made a note of where they were. She leaned forward and added another note. She was logging distance off the odometer, Ned saw.

Just ahead was a T-junction. There was a largish restaurant on the right and a small café ahead, with tables on both sides of the road. That seemed to be all there was to Le Tholonet. They went straight through. A little farther along the road rose a bit, the screening woods gave way, and they had their first glimpse of the full mountain, no trees between.

Ned was impressed. Hard not to be. Seen this close, Mont Sainte-Victoire completely dominated the landscape. It wasn’t huge, you weren’t going to snowboard down it in winter or anything, but there were no other mountains or hills around and the triangular peak was crisp and imposing. At the very top Ned saw a white cross.

“Well,” Melanie said, checking her notes, “Barrett’s written ‘money shot’ just ahead, where there’s a place to get off the road.”

Greg saw it and pulled over. He turned the engine off and hit the flashers again. They all got out.

The triangle loomed above a long green field. There were trees to their left, but none were in the way here; it was a wide-open shot, easy to frame. The rocky slopes were lit by the afternoon light. The mountain looked primitive and astonishing. The four of them were silent awhile, staring.

“Boss man won’t like it,” Steve said, finally. He put his sunglasses back on.

“I know,” Melanie said glumly. She sighed. “There’s a pull-over-and-snap-a-picture thing going on here. They might as well put up a Kodak sign and picnic tables.”

Ned wasn’t so sure, actually. The stony bleakness above the green meadow didn’t say “pretty” to him. It felt more powerful and unsettling than that. He was going to say something, but in the minute or so since they’d stopped and gotten out he had started to feel peculiar. He kept his mouth shut. Steve took a few more digitals.

“I’ll make a note, but let’s go on,” Melanie said. “I’m gonna get worried about Barrett Reinhardt, if this is his idea of a money shot.”

“The man wants to sell books,” said Greg. “This is, like, a photo of a painting everyone knows. Comfort food.”

They got back in. Ned swallowed, tasted something metallic in his mouth. He had no idea what this was. Veracook’s lunch? Unlikely. It was more of a headache than anything else, and it had come on really fast. He never got headaches, if you didn’t count the two times he and Barry Staley had drunk cheap wine at class parties and he’d thrown up on the walk home.

I really shouldn’t have remembered that, he thought.

He did feel nauseous, actually. The road continued to twist and wind south of the mountain. The swinging movement didn’t help at all. There were parking lots on their left where people could leave their cars and climb. He saw a big wooden signboard with a map of the mountain trails on it.

There was a kind of needle in his head now, as if someone had a sharp, small lance and was jabbing it into his left eye, repeatedly. A humming sound, too, high-pitched, like a dentist’s drill.

The others were busy talking as they went, Greg stopping and starting the van, the three of them eyeing angles along this side of the mountain, approaches to a shot, foreground, middle ground. Melanie was going on about the history of the place.

It sounded as if they’d decided none of these spots by the road was going to work. They were all too close to the mountain, no way to frame it. Ned was hardly listening now. He was just happy the three of them were busy and hadn’t noticed him leaning against his door, eyes closed behind the shades.

As if from a muffled distance he heard Melanie reading from her notes. History and geography. Maybe she’d write an essay for him. That was a thought. He could buy her some escargot.

He managed to open his eyes. There was a broad, green-gold plain ahead of them, stretching east and south, away from the mountain. Melanie was pointing that way. Ned couldn’t follow what she was saying. He closed his eyes again. He tried to focus on her voice, ride over the stabbing in his head.

“The whole landscape will change now,” Melanie was saying. “We’re directly south of the mountain. Everyone thinks of it as a triangle because that’s the side Cézanne mostly painted, but from here it’s a long, long ridge, no triangle, no peak. And ahead, where we turn north, is Pourrières, where the battle was. Just past that we’ll get to where he sent men for the ambush.”

“We take a look there?” Greg said.

“The ambush place? Yeah, sure. Pain de Munition, it’s called. Look for a sign. Maybe we’ll climb a bit. A photo from where they waited? Oliver Lee wrote a bit about the battle, I think.”

“Well, yeah, if there’s a photo,” Steve said. He didn’t sound happy. The three of them tried hard to please his father, Ned knew. They joked a lot, teased, but it was pretty obvious they were proud to be working for Edward Marriner.

He put a thumb to one temple and tried applying pressure. It didn’t help. He had no idea what Melanie was talking about. What ambush? What battle?

“Got a Tylenol?” he asked.

She turned quickly. “What’s wrong, Ned?”

“Kind of a headache.”

“Dork! The guy doesn’t say that on the date!”

“Be quiet, Gregory.” Melanie was fishing in the bottomless black tote. “Tylenol, Advil, Aspirin, which do you like? Advil’s better for a headache.”

Three choices. Figured. “Advil, please.”

They were in a village now, twisting through it, then they seemed to be out and going north. She gave him a couple of pills and some bottled water. Ned drank, managed a wan smile.

There was no photograph worth taking here, either; they were east of the mountain now, heading north to double back home along the other side, but trees blocked their view.

“Here’s your Painful Munitions place,” Greg said.

“That’s how I feel,” Ned muttered. “Artillery in my head.”

Greg followed a bumpy gravel road a short distance past a sign strictly forbidding entry, then braked to a halt. Ned was extremely happy when the car stopped.

“Okay, campers, out and scout,” Greg said. “Let’s get higher and see what’s what.”

“I don’t think I’ll climb up, if that’s okay,” Ned said. He was afraid he was going to be sick. The needle and drill had been joined by a hammer. “You guys do what you have to, I’ll wait here.”

He got out with them. Didn’t want to throw up in the van. He found a tree stump and sat down, his back to the sun.

“I’ll stay,” Melanie said. “You two go up. Phone if you need me.”

“You call if you need us,” Steve said, looking at Ned.

“I’m fine. Melanie, go and—”

“You aren’t fine. You’re halfway to green. I like green, but not in guys’ faces. Go on, you two.”

“We’ll be quick,” Greg said.

Ned felt acutely embarrassed, partly because he was actually glad Melanie was staying. He had never fainted in his life, but it crossed his mind that he might. He closed his eyes again behind the shades. It wasn’t that hot but he seemed to be sweating. His mouth was dry.

“Drink some more water,” Melanie said, bringing him the bottle. She took off her big straw hat and put it on his head to block the sun. “Do you get migraines?”

“Never in my life. You?”

“Lots. Is it off-centre, behind one eye? You feel like there’s an aura in your head?”

“What’s an aura in my head feel like?”

She laughed a little. “Who’s good at describing that stuff?”

He heard her walking around. “I don’t think there’s gonna be a photo up there, either,” she said. “The mountain’s just a treed slope from this side.”

Ned tried to function normally. “Maybe he could shoot at sunrise from up on top of it? Looking down and out? The opposite of Cézanne, sort of? Or look, maybe Dad just does the mountain from Barrett’s spot and the book says this is what Cézanne painted a hundred years ago.”

“Your father be happy with that?”

“Maybe. Probably not.” Ned swallowed some more water. Pressed the bottle to his forehead under the hat. “What was this ambush about?”

“You don’t need a history lesson now, Ned.”

“I need something to distract me. Have you ever fainted?”

“That bad? Oh, Ned! I’ll call the others.”

“No. Just talk. I’ll tell you if it gets worse.”

It was worse; he was waiting for the Advil to do something useful.

She sighed. “Okay. This area, right where we turned north, was like the biggest battlefield. One of those change-the-course-of-history things? A Roman named Marius beat this massive army of barbarians who were marching to take Rome. If he hadn’t stopped them here they might have, people think.”

“What kind of barbarians?”

“Couple of tribes joined together, migrating from the northeast. Celts, basically. The Romans called them barbarians, but they called everyone that.”

“How massive?” He kept the bottle on his forehead.

“Really. The books say two hundred thousand of them died here, maybe more, and they had their women and children with them. The survivors became slaves. That’s a lot of people. The Romans took a bunch of the leaders and threw them down a pit called the garagai up on top of the mountain. Marius had a witch or wise woman who told him to do that because it was like a sacrifice place, and so their spirits couldn’t return and help the tribes. That town where we turned up was later named Pourrières, which means putrefaction. Ick. Think about two hundred thousand rotting bodies.”

“I’d really prefer not to just now, thanks. Is this revenge, Melanie?”

“No! No, no, really! Oh, Ned, I’m sorry!”

But knowledge, however you got it, changed things, Ned Marriner thought. You couldn’t go back to not knowing, even if you wanted to. And when you put what you’d just heard together with other things, specifically yesterday, the feeling he’d had in the cloister…

He felt it again, right now, that inward awareness. Unblocking, unlocking.

Abruptly, Ned pushed off the log and stood up. His heart was pounding.

“What?”

“Shh. Wait.”

Afraid now, not just in pain, Ned took off his sunglasses. He opened his eyes in the too-bright light. Pain danced and drilled in his brain. But what he saw, looking out towards the mountain, was worse.

In what should have been the clear, mild light of spring, the trees and grass between them and the ridge of the mountain were bathed—were saturated—in a sickening, dark-red hue.

It was terrifying. As though he were looking through some lurid camera filter. The world lay drowned in the colour of blood. And suddenly he could smell it, too. Appalled, horrified, he felt as if he were tasting blood. It was in his mouth, his throat, sticky, thick, clogging and—

He turned away and was violently ill by the tree stump. Then again, and a third time, wrackingly, his guts turning inside out.

“Oh, my God, Ned! I should never have…”

“I don’t think I like this place a whole lot,” he said, breathing hard.

Melanie had her phone out.

“Don’t call them!” he said. It was difficult to speak. “I’m just…just a migraine, I guess.”

Too late. She was talking fast to Greg, calling them back. He couldn’t honestly say he was unhappy about that. He needed to get away from here, to somewhere where he could try to deal with the undeniable fact that he seemed to be seeing and feeling the presence of massive, violent death. A slaughter, the world soaked in blood.

Yesterday, a carving from eight hundred years ago. And now this.

“When did…?” He took a steadying breath. “Melanie, when was this battle?”

“Oh, Ned. Forget the damn battle! Here, wipe your face.” She handed him one of those packaged wet-wipes. One more thing in her tote. He did what she told him, put his sunglasses back on. Sipped some water.

“When was it? Please?”

“Oh, hell.” He heard her rummaging for her notes. His eyes were closed again. “123 b.c., I’ve got. Why do you want to talk about that?”

“Because I don’t want to talk about throwing up, okay?”

Two thousand, one hundred years.

What happened when you fainted? Did your eyes roll up in their sockets? Could you die, like, if you banged your head on a rock or something?

He heard the guys coming down. He kept his shades on. He knew if he took them off he’d see that redness again, everywhere. A world defined by dark blood. The smell was still with him, like meat, a thick, rotting—

Helplessly, just as the other two arrived, Ned heaved again—dry, convulsive, nothing left in him.

“Jeez!” Greg said. “You’re really clocked out, aren’t you? Let’s roll. We’ll get you into Veracook’s hands, and bed.”

They got back in the van. Greg started it, geared up, and they continued north, then left at a junction back along the other side of the mountain.

Greg didn’t slow down to look for photo spots now, he was driving fast, on a road not meant for it. Ned, leaning against his door, was aware of Steve and Melanie casting glances at him every few seconds. He wanted to be brave—the heroic invalid—but it was hard when you kept smelling blood, and the swinging motion of the van was no help.

And then, halfway back along that winding stretch of road on the northern shoulder of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he was fine.

He was absolutely fine. It was gone.

A really bad taste in his mouth from throwing up, but nothing more than that. Nothing but the memory. And he knew it wasn’t the miraculous properties of Advil. Cautiously, he took off his sunglasses. No blood-red hue to the afternoon sky or the trees. Only memory. And fear. There was that, too.

“Almost home,” Melanie said, in a worried voice.

“I’m good,” Ned said. He looked at her. “Honestly. I am. It’s gone. No aura, nothing.”

“You serious?” Steve had turned and was staring at him.

“Really. I’m not lying. I have no idea what that was about.” That last part was a lie, but what was he going to say?

“Food poisoning, migraine, jet lag.” Melanie ticked them off. He could hear relief in her voice. It touched him, actually.

“Guilt? Over what you did to our phones?” Steve said from the front seat.

“Has to be that,” Ned agreed.

“I’m still taking you home,” Greg said. “You can postpone your date till tomorrow.”

“No way,” Ned said. “And it isn’t a date. It’s a Coke at five o’clock.”

“Hah!” said Greg. He, too, was obviously happier now.

“Well, we’ll stop at the villa anyhow,” said Melanie. “You’ve got time and it’s on the way. You might want to shower and brush your teeth. Think of the girl, please.”

“Right. And you can check my fingernails and ears and tie my shoelaces again. Double knot?”

She laughed. “Piss off, Ned. I am way too young and cool for that.” She grinned. “You should be so lucky as to have me kneel in front of you.”

Ned felt himself flush.

Greg snorted. “You? Cool? With a bottomless bag like Mary Poppins? No, you aren’t, Mel,” he said. “Sorry to break it to you.”

She leaned forward and hit him on the shoulder.

“Don’t fondle the driver,” Greg said. He started singing, “Spoonful of Sugar,” and Steve joined him.

Ned rolled down his window. The air was crisp and clear. Wildflowers, yellow and white and purple, dotted the sides of the road. They crossed over a small bridge. The view along the ravine below was gorgeous. He saw Melanie checking it out, too. She scribbled something in her notebook. That had actually been a really sexy line, what she’d said.

Up front the guys were still singing that song from Mary Poppins. Melanie leaned forward and gave them each another futile whack with her notebook, then she sat back and crossed her arms and tried to look aggrieved.

She saw him looking at her, and winked. Of course. He had to laugh. Melanie.

CHAPTER V

“Blood? Like, really blood colour?”

Kate had another espresso in front of her; Ned had ordered orange juice this time. She’d arrived at the café about five minutes after him, a bit breathless. Her school was halfway across town. The two outdoor spots had been taken again; all around their small table the interior was crowded with people talking loudly, smoking, reading papers, shopping bags at their feet. Ned still wasn’t used to the smoke; it was everywhere here.

He nodded. “Blood red. And I could taste blood when I swallowed. It made me sick. But only near that battlefield. It was over when we drove away.”

She was staring at him, brown eyes, lightly freckled face. She had her hair pulled back today, was wearing torn jeans and a blue-and-white striped tank top with a man’s white shirt over it, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled halfway up. She looked pretty good, Ned thought.

He said, “If you don’t believe me, no one else is going to. I can’t even tell anyone else.”

Kate shook her head. “Oh, believe me, I believe you.” She met his eyes and then looked away. “After yesterday, I’d believe it if you said you saw the aliens’ mother ship.”

“That’s next week,” he said. She made a face.

“You know anything about this Marius?” he asked after a moment. “The battle there?”

She bit her lip; he was used to that already. Then she looked down at the tabletop.

Ned laughed aloud. “Aha! Of course you know.”

“I knew you’d laugh,” she said. “Why is it dumb to be interested in things?”

Ned looked at her. “It isn’t,” he said. “Tell me. I’m not teasing.”

“Well…I actually wrote an essay about this.”

“Oh, God, Kate, you kill me! I have to tease you.” He stopped. Thought quickly. “Wait—maybe I, ah, won’t. Um, do you have it? Here? The essay?”

She raised her eyebrows, took her time answering. “Ned Marriner, I am shocked…Do you want to plagiarize my paper?”

“Damn right I want to plagiarize your paper! I have three essays to write in six weeks, or ruin my summer back home.”

“Well,” she said, leaning back and grinning now, “I’ll have to think hard about that. I’ve been needled a whole lot here, and we just met, you know. You can’t go around handing out ‘A’ papers to just anyone.”

“I’ll buy your coffees. I’ll buy you a better shirt.”

“This,” said Kate Wenger, “is my brother’s shirt, and I happen to like it a lot.”

“It is great. Truly great. You look hot in it. A babe. Tell me about Marius.”

“Do I really look hot?”

“Hotter than Marie-Chantal could ever dream of being.”

“That,” she sniffed, “is no achievement.”

“Marius? Please?”

She sipped her coffee. She looked happy, though. Ned felt kind of pleased with himself. He was being funny, making a girl laugh. Around them the place was vibrant with the clatter of dishes and cups and the buzz of talk. One woman had a small dog under her chair; that wouldn’t have been allowed back home. He liked it.

“Marius was Julius Caesar’s uncle,” Kate said. “Married Caesar’s aunt. A general in North Africa at the time. Apparently a little guy, tough, smart, young when this happened—like maybe twenty-five or something? Well, what it was is these eastern tribes started moving this way. A lot of them, with their women and children, migrating, looking for a place to settle. They scared everyone, huge men, you know?”

“Blond dudes? Pumped iron, used steroids? Broke the home run record?”

“Pretty much. The Romans were small, did you know that?”

“I didn’t know that. Why would I know that?”

“Well, they were. But really organized. Anyhow, these tribes, the Teutones and Cimbrii, hung around here awhile and beat up a Roman army, then half of them went west to Spain. But they came back again and decided what they really wanted was land around Rome, and they decided they were going to go kick ass there.”

“Could they have?”

“Everyone seems to think so. That’s the point of the story. Rome was terrified. This is before their empire, remember? Before Caesar. They hadn’t even conquered here yet, just some Greek and Roman trading colonies on the coast…and Sextius had founded this city, Aix. Their first one.”

“And so?”

“And so if the tribes got down into Italy it was probably game over.”

“Melanie said more than two hundred thousand.”

“Who’s Melanie again?”

“My father’s assistant. I told you yesterday. She has notes on everything.”

“What a geek.” Kate grinned. “Way, way more than two hundred thousand. Some people say half a million, with the women and children. Some say more.”

Ned whistled softly. It seemed called for. Someone glanced over and he grimaced an apology. He tried to imagine that many people moving across a landscape and gave up. He couldn’t visualize it: just got an image of computer-generated orcs.

“Anyhow,” Kate said, “Rome ordered Marius here from Africa and he took charge. They’d been creamed by the tribes in that first battle, and all the soldiers were afraid of them.”

“But he won?”

“Spoiling the ending, you. Yeah, he won. From what I gather, he steered them into a trap by the mountain. He had a better position, and when the fight started some of his men ambushed the Celts’ camp where their families were. When they turned to defend them, the Romans just pounded on them from behind and it was a massacre. That’s your two hundred thousand dead. Marius saves the day. They built him monuments around here, but they’ve all fallen down.”

Ned looked at her awhile. “You’re good, you know.”

She shrugged. “Google is your friend.”

“Nope. You’re good.” He finished his orange juice. “So, like, if he hadn’t beat them, they’d have taken Rome?”

“Maybe. No Roman Empire. Celts settle Italy. Really different world. This battle was a huge deal.”

Ned shook his head. “Why doesn’t anyone know this stuff?”

“You kidding? People don’t even know World War Two.”

He looked at her. “I really need that paper of yours.”

“I’ll bet you do. I’ll think about it.” She hesitated. “I mean, no, of course I’ll give it to you. But doesn’t it seem pretty trivial after what—”

“Kate, it seems completely trivial! Essays? Are you kidding me? But if I think too much about this afternoon or yesterday I’ll freak.”

“There’s…nothing now? Inside you?”

He faked a shrug. “I’m too distracted by that way-cool tank top of yours.”

“No jokes. Tell me.”

“I told you. Nothing today since we left the battlefield. Nothing yesterday from the time our guy walked out on us. N-O-thing.”

“Have you tried to…?” she trailed off.

“Tried to what?” He knew he was sounding irritated, and knew it was unfair. “Control it? You gonna play Yoda now? ‘Use the Force, Young Ned’?”

“Stop joking.”

“I have to joke or I’ll go screwy with this. Be grateful you aren’t dealing with it!”

She was silent a moment. “I am,” she said. “I am grateful. But I was there too. I’m not trying to hassle you.”

Ned felt ashamed. “I’m not being cool, am I? Sorry.”

“Hard to be cool if you’re tasting blood and stuff.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Kate waved her hand for the bill. “Okay, I’ll take off. Call me tomorrow, if you like. After school.”

“Don’t go yet,” he said quickly. She looked at him. “I…there’s no one else I can talk to. I need to touch base. If you don’t mind.”

“I said call me. I meant it.” She flushed a little.

He sighed. “I did try, actually, middle of last night, to see if I could feel anything. Problem is, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, or controlling. Maybe I do need a Jedi Master.”

“Not me, Young Ned. I can give you an essay, though. Want me to email it?”

“That’d be good.” She took out her notebook and he gave her his hotmail address, and added his new cell number.

“Reminds me,” she said. “You asked about Celts, where they were around here?”

“And of course you found out. Google is your friend?”

“Google is my midnight lover.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready to hear that, actually.”

She laughed. “They were all over the area. Which figured. There’s one place I’ve seen that we can walk to if you want. Above the city.”

The waiter came by and they paid for their drinks.

“Might as well,” Ned said. “Can’t tomorrow, we’re going to Arles.”

She nodded. “Day after? Thursday? Meet after school, say, outside Cézanne’s studio? Can you find it? We have to go that way.”

“I’ll find it. Where are we going?”

“It’s called Entremont. Where the Celts were based before the Romans built this city.”

“Okay. I’ll be outside that studio at five. I’ll call you tomorrow, when we get back from Arles.”

“Cool.” She got up, stuffed the notepad in her pack. They walked out together. On the street he turned to her.

“Thanks, Kate.”

She shrugged. “Down, boy. You may not like the essay.”

“Now who’s joking?”

She made a face. “Okay. You’re welcome. Call me.”

She gave him a little flip-wave with one hand, then turned and walked along the cobblestones. He watched her go.

Inside the café, the man in the grey leather jacket, two tables over from where they’d been, puts down his newspaper. There is no need to hide his face any more.

He might have learned something here, he is thinking.

A thread, a way into the labyrinth. This is a possibility, no more than that, but it is that. When you were in urgent need and time was very short and your enemy had most of the weapons—at this point—you used tools like these two children, and prayed to your gods.

In one way it is obvious; in another, the girl is entirely right: there are too many choices here. And from where he is—outside the fires—he has no easy way to narrow them down.

There are still too many places, that hasn’t changed, but he’s decided something, sitting here—and these two are at the heart of it, despite what he said to them yesterday.

The boy, from the start. From before the baptistry, since he’s being truthful—and he always is, with himself.

He isn’t certain about the girl. He’d waited and watched them from a distance yesterday, after leaving the cloister. Saw them walk here. Made an assumption they’d be back. If he’d been wrong, if they had met elsewhere, not after school, or not at all, he wouldn’t have been unduly disturbed. Few things affect him that much any more. When he is in the world again, when he returns, his is an entirely focused existence.

He is only ever alive for one thing. Well, two, really.

At the same time, he wasn’t surprised when they did show up here. Nor by what he heard the girl say, from behind the screening pages of Le Monde. They have no business going where they are going two days from now, but he might.

He might have many lives’ worth of business there. Or not. He might lose this time, before it even begins. It has happened. It is unfair, an unbalanced aspect of the combat, but he has long since moved beyond thinking that way. What is fairness, in this dance?

His sitting here is, in the end, just a feeble reaching out for signs—from two children who have nothing to do with the tale. At the same time, he has learned (he’s had a long time to learn) that little is truly coincidence. Things fall into patterns. You can miss patterns, or break them, but they are there. He’d acted upon that yesterday, and now.

He finds a few coins, drops them on the table, rises to go.

“Why didn’t I know you were here?”

He looks up. His way out is blocked. He is actually startled. The sensation is truly strange, a lost feeling remembered. For no easy reason he suddenly has an image of his first time here, walking through the forest from the landing place, invited but uncertain. Afraid, so far from home. Then coming out of the woods, the lit fires.

He sits down again. He gestures. The boy is standing between the table and the door. He sits gingerly opposite, edge of chair, as if ready to bolt. Not a bad instinct, all things considered.

The newspaper lies on the table between them, folded back. He’d been reading the forecast. Wind, clear skies. There will be a full moon Thursday. He’d known that, of course.

The boy has spoken in English. The man says, gravely, in the same language, “You have surprised me again. Brave of you to come back. I take it you sent the girl away?”

Ned Marriner shrugs. He has dark brown hair and light blue eyes, a lean build, medium height, wiry rather than strong. Barely old enough to shave. His face is pale; he will be dealing with tension and fear. Fair enough.

Welcome to my world, the man thinks, but doesn’t say. He doesn’t feel welcoming.

“No, she just went. I don’t send her places. I didn’t know anything till I was outside. And besides, I’m the one feeling…whatever this is. If you’re dangerous, there’s no reason for her to be here.”

“Dangerous?” He smiles at that. “You have no idea. I said I wouldn’t kill you, but there are others who might view your presence differently.”

“I know I have no idea. But what does ‘my presence’ mean? My presence where?” He stops, to control himself. His voice has risen. “And why didn’t I know you were here until I got outside? Yesterday I…”

That last he decides to answer.

“I was careless. I was screening myself from you, after yesterday in the cloister, but I thought you’d gone and so I let it down.”

“I had gone. I don’t even know why I checked inside. I was halfway across the market square.”

He considers that. “Then you are stronger than you knew.”

“I don’t know anything,” the boy says again. His voice is lower now, intense. There was someone like this, long ago. A vague sense tugs at him. But there are too many years between. He has been here so many times.

Ned Marriner leans back, folding his arms defensively across his chest. “I have no idea who you are, or what happened to me yesterday or today, if you heard us talking about that.”

He nods. The mountain.

“So what is this about?” the boy demands. He really shouldn’t be using that tone. “You said we were an accident, had no role to play, but you followed, or waited for us.”

He is clever, it seems. “Followed yesterday, waited just now. I took a chance you’d come back.”

“But why?”

The waiter is hovering. He signals for another of what each of them was drinking.

A mild curiosity rises. He still has some of that, it seems. “You don’t feel reckless, interrogating me like this?”

“I’m scared out of my mind, if you want the truth.”

“But that isn’t the truth,” he says. Who did this one remind him of? “You came back by choice, you’re demanding answers of me. And yet you know that I sculpted a column eight hundred years ago. No. You’re frightened, but not ruled by it.”

“I probably should be,” the boy says in a small voice. “It isn’t a column, either, it’s a woman.”

The quick, familiar anger. A sense of intrusion, violation, rude feet trampling in something private beyond words.

He makes himself move past it. By today’s standards this one is young, can still properly be called a boy. In the past, he could have been a war leader at his age. Fit for challenging, killing. He has killed children.

The world has changed. He has lived through the changes, at intervals. Coming and going, enmeshed in the long pattern. Sometimes he wants it over, mostly he is terrified, heart-scalded that it might end. You could grow weary beyond measure, feeling all those things at once.

The waiter comes back: an espresso, an orange juice. The brisk, habitual motions. He waits until the man leaves.

He says, still speaking English for privacy, “Once this awareness comes to you, it can be a kind of anchor against fear. You know what you are feeling, know a new thing is in you. The fear lies in not understanding why, but already you’re not the person you were yesterday morning.”

He sips his espresso, puts the cup down, adds quietly, “You never will be again.”

A cruel thing to say, perhaps; he isn’t beyond enjoying that.

“That’s scary too.”

“I imagine it is.”

He remembers his own first awareness of this boy, decisions made quickly. They look at each other. The boy glances down. Few people meet his gaze for long. He finishes his coffee. “Frightened or not, you came back. You could have kept walking. You’re inside now.”

“Then you need to tell me what I’m inside.”

Another flaring within. “I need to do nothing. Use words more cautiously.”

“Or what?”

Opposing anger across the table, interestingly. He really isn’t accustomed to talking this much any more.

“Or what?” the boy demands again. “You’ll stab me in here? Pull the knife again?”

He shakes his head. “Or I’ll walk out.”

Ned Marriner hesitates again, then leans forward. “No you won’t. You don’t want to leave me. You want me in this, somehow. What did we say, Kate and me, that you needed to hear?”

Someone else had once talked to him this way. That nagging memory still there. Was it centuries ago, or a millennium? He isn’t sure; people blur after so much time, but he believes he killed that other one.

He looks across the table and realizes that he was wrong, in fact. This impudent tone isn’t the same as that other, long-ago voice: with a degree of surprise (again) he sees that the boy is close to tears, fighting to hide it.

He tries, unsuccessfully, to remember when he felt that way himself. Too far back. Mist-wrapped, forest-shrouded.

This defiant anger is a boy’s, in the end. Or perhaps in the beginning. Anger at helplessness, at being ignorant and young, not yet an adult and so immune (boys believed adults were immune) to the pain he is feeling.

Had he been a different man he might have addressed some of this. Ned Marriner has, after all, come to the edges of the tale, and he might even be an instrument.

But that is all he can be. You didn’t confide in tools or comfort them. You made use of what lay to hand. He stands up, drops a few coins on the table. The boy lifts his head to look at him.

“I don’t know if you said anything I need. It is too long to tell, and I’m disinclined to do so. You are better off not knowing, though it may not seem that way to you. You will have to forgive me—or not, as you like.”

Then he adds (perhaps a mistake, it occurs to him, even as he speaks), “I wouldn’t go up to Entremont on the eve of Beltaine, though.”

The youthful gaze is sharp, suddenly.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Ned Marriner says. He doesn’t look any more as if he might cry. “What Kate said? About that place?”

The man doesn’t respond. He really isn’t accustomed to answering questions. Never has been, if truth were told, even from when he entered the tale himself a little west of here, having come across the sea.

Everyone here has come from somewhere else.

He’d said that to her, once. He remembers her reply. He remembers everything she has ever said to him, it sometimes feels.

He walks to the café door and out into the late-April afternoon.

The dogs have been waiting, scuffling around the market nearby. They attack as soon as he reaches the street.

Ned heard a woman scream. There were shouts and—unbelievably—the snarling of animals in the middle of the city.

At the two tables outside people were scrambling to their feet, backing desperately away from something. Ned leaped up. He wasn’t really thinking. Thought took too long, sometimes. He ran towards the door. On the way, he grabbed one of the café chairs.

It may have saved his life.

The wolfhound sprang just as he cleared the door. Purely by reflex, adrenalin surging, Ned swung the chair up. He cracked the animal on the head with all the power fear had given him. The impact knocked Ned into one of the outdoor tables and he fell over it, hitting his shoulder hard. The dog cartwheeled in mid-air, landed on the street. It lay on one side, didn’t move.

Ned got up quickly. The lean man was surrounded by three other animals, all of them big, dark grey, feral. These weren’t anyone’s pets off leash, Ned thought.

People were still screaming from farther along the street and in the market square, but no one came to help. He did see someone on a cellphone. Calling the police?

He hoped. Again, without really thinking, he stepped forward. He shouted, trying to get the animals’ attention. One of them turned immediately, teeth bared. Wonderful, Ned thought. When you got what you wanted, you really needed to be sure you’d wanted it.

But the man in the leather jacket moved then, swift and unnervingly graceful. He slashed at the distracted dog with his knife. The blade came out red, the animal went down. Ned moved forward, wielding the awkward chair, feinting with it like some ridiculous lion-tamer, facing one of the last two dogs.

He really didn’t know what he was doing. He was a distraction, no more, but that was enough. He saw the bald-headed man leave his feet in a sudden, lethal movement and the reddened knife took another animal. The man landed, rolled on the road, and was back on his feet.

These were more like wolves than dogs, Ned realized. There was nothing in his experience of life to fit the idea of wolves—or wolfhounds—attacking people in a city street.

But there was only one left.

Then none, as the last animal showed its teeth in a white-flecked snarl and fled through the market square as people backed away in panic. It tore diagonally across, down a street on the far side, and was gone.

Ned was breathing hard. He put a hand to his cheek and checked: no blood. He looked at the man beside him. He saw him wipe the bloodied knife on a blue napkin retrieved from the ground beside a toppled table. Ned set down his chair. For no good reason, he righted the table. His hands were trembling again.

The man looked at him and grimaced. “Curse his soul,” he said softly. “He thinks he is amusing.”

Ned blinked. He shook his head as if he had water in his ears, like after a high-board dive, and he hadn’t heard rightly. “Amusing?” he repeated, stupidly.

“He plays games. Like a wayward child.”

People were approaching, cautiously.

“Games?” Ned repeated again, his voice high-pitched, as if it hadn’t broken yet. He was aware that he wasn’t holding up his end of this conversation very well. “I…that thing went for my throat.”

“You did choose to come out,” the man said. “We invite our fate, some of the time.”

He said it the way you might comment on the weather or someone’s new shirt or shoes. He brushed at his jacket and looked at the crowd around them. “I suggest departing, unless you want to spend an evening answering questions you can’t answer.”

Ned swallowed. The man looked at him another moment. He hesitated. When he did speak, Ned had to strain to catch it.

“She is worth it, always and ever,” was what he heard.

Then, before Ned could say anything, or even begin to think of what he might say, the man spun around and began to run, north up the road towards the cathedral.

For an uncertain moment, Ned looked at the frightened, concerned faces around him. He shrugged, gestured vaguely, and then took off as well.

He ran the other way, across the market square, hearing urgent shouts in his wake. Someone even grabbed for him. Ned slashed the brief, restraining hand away, and kept going.

He sprinted until he was out of town.

Only on the Route de Vauvenargues, leading east towards the cut-off to the villa, did he settle into a proper stride. He was in jeans, wasn’t dressed for a run, but he had his Nikes on, and he badly needed to be moving just now.

Somewhere along the way he started to swear under his breath, rhythmically. His mother hated it when he swore. A failure of imagination, she called it.

His mother was in a civil-war zone where people were dying every day. Ned’s shoulder hurt, his cheek was banged up, and he was scared and angry in pretty much equal measure. He actually felt as if he might be sick for the second time in a day.

Amusing? Someone had meant that to be funny?

It occurred to him that the man—he really needed a name—had said pretty much the same thing about the skull and sculpted head yesterday.

Ned could almost smell the hot breath of the animal that had leaped for him. If he hadn’t grabbed that chair on the way out—he had no idea what had made him do that—he’d have had teeth ripping into him.

How amusing. Just hilarious. Put it on America’s Funniest Home Videos with all the other cute little animals and men falling over tables. And how extremely grateful that arrogant son of a bitch had been, come to think of it. Not a word of thanks.

We invite our fate, he’d said.

Whatever the hell that meant. Ned, rubbing his shoulder now as he ran, muttered a few more words that would have got him into trouble if either parent had been there to hear.

Well, they weren’t. And they weren’t going to be much good to him in this. Whatever this was, anyhow.

She is worth it, always and ever.

He was pretty certain that was what he’d heard.

As he turned off the main road, taking their own uphill lane, the words hit him hard, a different sort of blow. Tidings from that still-distant, really complicated adult world he seemed to be approaching. And from somewhere else, as well, a place farther away, that he also seemed to be entering now, like it or not.

A few dozen strides later it occurred to Ned Marriner that if he’d wanted to, or had been thinking clearly enough, he could have taken those last words as a thank-you of sorts, after all. A confiding, explanation, even an apology from someone not obviously inclined to any of those things.

As the villa came in sight at the top of their roadway, beyond a sloping meadow and the lawn, framed against the trees that sheltered it from the wind, he was thinking of a rose placed yesterday beside a sculpted figure that was not the Queen of Sheba.

CHAPTER VI

The others were on the terrace having a drink as Ned came up the gravel drive. The sun, west over the city, sent a long, slanting light. It fell on the cypresses, the house, the water in the pool, and on the four people sitting outside, making them look golden, like gods.

“You should see yourselves,” Ned called, keeping his tone cheerful. “The light’s amazing.”

In a moment like this, he thought, you could get a pretty good idea of what people loved so much about Provence.

He kept on moving; he didn’t want to get close to the others until he checked himself in the mirror. “I’m gonna shower, be right out.”

“Dude,” Greg called out, “you were supposed to phone me for a ride!”

“Too nice a day,” he shouted back, going around the side of the house to enter through the front, not from the terrace doors where they were.

“Ned, are you all right?” his father called.

They’d told him about earlier, obviously. He supposed they’d had to. He’d been pretty sick.

“I’m fine,” he said, not breaking stride. “Down in twenty minutes.”

He passed Veracook in the hallway and she didn’t seem too alarmed at the sight of him. He looked in the bathroom mirror upstairs. His shoulder hurt, he’d have a bruise, be sore for a couple of days, but nothing worse than what you got in a hockey game, and he didn’t think his cheek looked too bad. They might not even notice.

“oh, my god, Ned! What happened to your face?” Melanie cried, the second he walked out on the terrace with a Coke.

Melanie, he thought. He bet the three men wouldn’t have seen a thing.

He shrugged. “Stupid accident. I got rushed by a dog near the fruit-and-veg market and fell over a café table.”

“A dog?” his father said.

“Big one, too,” Ned said, taking a chair and stretching out his legs casually. He sipped from his Coke and put it on the table. Larry Cato had told him years ago that when you lied you cut as close to the truth as you could or way far off. One or the other. It was aliens with ray guns, or a dog and a café table. Larry was the type who had theories about these things.

“What the hell?” Steve said. “Did you, like, get bit?”

“No, no, no. I just fell. He ran off when people yelled at him.”

Melanie had gone into the kitchen. She came back out with ice cubes in a plastic bag, a dish towel wrapped around them. She handed it to him, wordlessly.

“My own fault, probably,” Ned said. “I was jogging through the market and who knows what the dog thought I was. A terrorist or something.” His father looked dubious. “I’m okay, really. A bruise. I’ll live, Dad.” He held the ice dutifully to his face.

“What about earlier?” his father asked. “On the drive?”

He really did have a lot to explain. “That was weird,” Ned said. “And then it totally went away. Don’t say food poisoning or Veracook will kill herself.”

“We all ate the same food, anyhow,” Melanie said. “I’m thinking motion sickness after jet lag.”

Ned managed a grin. “You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at.”

Steve laughed. Movie joke. Ned saw that his father was still eyeing him.

“I’m fine, Dad. Honestly. How did it go at lunch?”

Edward Marriner leaned back in his chair. “Very pleasant. Perfectly likable man. Likes his wine. He said he saw the book as more mine than his, so I said the opposite and we got on like a house on fire.”

“Where does that expression come from, anyhow?” Greg asked, of no one in particular.

No one answered. Ned relaxed a little. He heard birds from the slope above the house. Aix gleamed below them, down the valley in the late daylight.

“This,” said Steve, looking the same way, “is pretty cool, have to say.”

It was, Ned thought. There were at least a couple of more hours before sunset, but the light was already turning everything an amber hue and the shadows of the cypresses were falling vividly across the grass.

“I told you,” he said, “you guys were a photograph up here—for your own albums.” A thought occurred to him. “Dad, if you tried Barrett’s money shot right around now the mountain would look pretty goddamned unbelievable.”

“Language, Ned,” his father said, absent-mindedly. “Your mother’s calling soon.”

“Right. And God forbid I swear within an hour of talking to her. She’ll know!”

Steve laughed again.

His father grinned. “Touché. Steve said Barrett’s would be a tourist shot.”

“Maybe not at this hour,” Steve said. “Ned could be right. And those plane trees we told you about—if you didn’t shoot down the alley but across, from the west, with the sun on them, their shadows, maybe an hour later than this…”

“We’ll have a look,” Ned’s father said. “One day when the light looks right we’ll drive out. If I buy it, we can arrange to set up another time. It’s only—what?—twenty minutes from here.”

“Bit more,” said Melanie. “Ned, keep the ice on your cheek.”

Ned put the ice back. It was really cold. He knew what she’d say if he said that. How did someone with a punk look and green-streaked hair get so efficient, that’s what he wanted to know.

“How was the hot date?” Greg asked. “Before the dog had to beat you off her.”

“It wasn’t hot or a date. But it was fine,” Ned said, repressively. There were limits.

“Who is this?” his father asked, predictably.

Ned gave him a look. “Her name’s Lolita LaFlamme, she’s a stripper at the HotBooty Club in town. She’s thirty-six and studying nuclear physics in her spare time.”

Melanie giggled. Edward Marriner raised an eyebrow.

“I do sometimes forget,” his father said slowly, brushing at his moustache with one hand, “that amid the blessings of my life, which are many and considerable, I am raising an adolescent son. Having had your brief moment of dubious wit, my child, could you enlighten me more cogently?”

His father talked like that to be funny, Ned knew. He wasn’t actually upset. You had no doubts when his dad was really angry.

Ned sighed, rattled it off. “Kate Wenger, my age, here for a term at school, exchange from New York. Met her yesterday. Student-geek type. Giving me some help with one of my essays.”

That last, he realized—too late—was a mistake.

Larry Cato would have shaken his head sorrowfully. Dude, never tell more than you need to, he’d have said.

“Ah. Some help? I believe I know what that means. Are you going to copy her paper?”

His father asked it mildly. His mom would have gone ballistic.

“Of course he’s going to copy her paper!” Greg said. “Jeez, cut him some slack, boss, he’s in the south of France!”

“I do know his approximate geographic location,” Ned’s father said, trying to sound stern. He looked at his son a moment. “Very well. Here’s our deal, Ned: you can get notes for one paper from this girl, the other two you write yourself. Fair?”

“Fair.”

It was, especially since they had no way of checking on him. Larry would have called it a no-brainer, flat-out win.

“And no one tells your mother or we’re both in trouble.”

“You think I’m going to tell her?”

“I might,” said Melanie cheerfully, “if some unnamed people aren’t nicer to me.”

“Blackmail,” said Ned darkly, “is a crime, threatening the peace and security of the world.”

On cue, the phone rang inside.

“Shall I get that?” Melanie said sweetly.

But even as she spoke, Edward Marriner was out of his chair and moving through the terrace doors.

They all looked at each other. He’d gone in very fast. It made Ned think for a moment. He wasn’t, obviously, the only one worried about his mother, waiting for that call.

After a bit, as the other three remained silent, he got up and went quietly into the kitchen. His father was at the table they’d set up against the wall in the dining room where the main computer and a telephone were.

Bending to grab an apple from the fridge, Ned could hear his father’s voice. He washed the apple at the sink. Veracook smiled at him again.

Ned heard his dad saying, “That’s not especially far from shelling, Meghan.”

And after a pause, dryly, “Oh, fine then, if someone said they’re going the other way.”

Ned took a bite of the apple, unhappily. He heard, “I’m sorry, Meg, you have to allow us to worry. You can’t stop that any more than we can stop you going.”

He thought about heading back outside. Wasn’t sure he felt good about hearing this. His stomach was tight again.

“Ned’s fine,” his father said. “A bit jet-lagged. Yes, of course he’s concerned, tries to pretend he isn’t.” A pause. “I think he likes the set-up well enough. Who knows at that age? He’s made a friend already, it seems.” Another silence. “No, he hasn’t started his essays. Honey, we’ve been here three days.” He stopped again. “Yes, I’m working. Doesn’t mean—”

His father stopped, and then, surprisingly, laughed.

Edward Marriner’s laughter was different when he was talking to his wife, Ned realized.

“He’s out on the terrace with the others,” he heard, and moved back through the kitchen door, to be out on the terrace with the others.

Melanie glanced up. She didn’t wink or anything, just looked at him.

A little later he heard his father call his name and he went back in and took the phone. His dad walked away.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey! How are you?” The connection was pretty good. His mother sounded the way she always did.

“I’m cool. Nice house. A pool and stuff. Come visit.”

She laughed. “Wish I could. Send me jpegs. There’s a satellite link at our base.”

“Okay. So, hey, you all right?”

“I’m fine, sweetie. Busy. There’s lots to be done.”

“I’m sure.”

“They badly need doctors here.”

“I’m sure,” he said again. “Well, all right, okay then, good talking. You take care.”

“Ned?”

“Yeah?”

A little silence. “I really am fine.”

“I believe you.”

A small laugh; he knew that laugh. “Make your father believe me.”

“Not easy, Mom.”

And that was about as much as he intended to say. She was smart, though, she was really smart, and he could tell from the silence that she was trying to think how to reply. “Leave it, Mom,” he said. “Just keep calling.”

“Of course I will. Dad says you’ve made a friend.”

“Yeah, I’m quick that way.”

Another silence, he was a bit sorry about that one.

She said, as he’d been pretty sure she would, “Ned, don’t be angry. Doing this is important for me.”

“Sure,” Ned said. “And you’re doing a lot of good. Stay cool, keep phoning. Don’t worry about us. I’ll get started on my essays soon.”

She was silent again, he could hear her breathing, far away, could picture her face right now.

“Bye, Mom,” he said, and hung up.

It had become necessary to get off the line. He stared down at the phone and took a few deep breaths. He heard his father come back in. He turned around. They looked at each other a moment.

“Damn it to hell,” said Edward Marriner.

Ned nodded. “Yeah,” he said, quietly. “Exactly.”

His father smiled crookedly at him. “Watch your language,” he murmured. And as Ned smiled back, he added, with a rueful shake of his head, “Let’s go for dinner. I’ll let you have a beer.”

they went to a bistro on the road east, a place out of town towards the mountain, but not so near as to worry Ned about what had happened earlier.

Melanie had picked the place. She had about twenty restaurants in her notebook: phone numbers, specialties, hours. Probably all the chefs’ names, Ned thought. In green ink.

Everyone else had some kind of special asparagus appetizer, and fish, but Ned stayed with steak and frites, a chocolate mousse after, and was happy enough. His shoulder hurt but he’d known it would. His father did actually offer him half a beer but Ned passed. He didn’t much like beer.

His new cellphone rang as they were walking back to the car.

“Damn,” said Greg. “Damn! I knew it was a hotdate. How does he get chicks to call him so fast?”

“Better swim trunks,” Melanie said.

“Right. And how would she know that?”

“Women know these things,” Melanie said. It was dark in the parking lot, but Ned was pretty sure she winked at him.

The stars were out by then, winking themselves in a blue-black sky, and the moon, nearly full, had risen while they were inside. He walked away from the others, his sandals crunching on gravel, and answered the phone.

A woman. Not Kate Wenger.

“Hello, is this Ned? Ned Marriner?”

Not a voice he’d ever heard. Speaking English, slight British accent.

“It’s me. Who is this, please?”

“It is you. I’m so glad. Ned, listen carefully. Did anyone hear you ask that question? You need to pretend you’re talking to someone you know.”

“Why do I need to do that?”

It was curious, he really had never heard this voice, but there was something about it, nonetheless. A variant, a riff.

“I’ll answer later, I promise. Can you make an excuse to go out for a bit when you get home from dinner? Running, maybe? I’ll meet you.”

“How do you know I run?”

“I promise answers. Trust me.”

“And how do you know this number?”

“The woman at the house gave it to me. I called there first. Ned, please? We need to meet, somewhere without people.”

“That’s a bad movie line.”

She chuckled at that; it made her sound younger. “It is, isn’t it? Meet me alone by the old oak tree?”

“Then why? Why with no one there?”

She hesitated.

He had, with every word she spoke, more of that sense of something almost recognized.

“Because I can keep track inwardly of anyone approaching,” she said.

“What? How do you…?”

“You know how I do that, Ned. Since yesterday.”

That silenced him pretty fast. He walked a bit farther away.

His father called. “Ned! You’re keeping people waiting. Bad manners. Phone her back from the villa.”

He lifted a hand in agreement. “I have to get back to the others. And you still haven’t said who you are.”

“I know I haven’t.” He heard her draw a breath. “I’m nervous. I didn’t want to do it this way.” Another silence. “I’m your aunt, Ned. Meghan’s older sister. The one who went away.”

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