Celtic Fire

It felt even heavier now than it had when she had stolen it from the museum, but then she had been fueled by adrenaline and urged on by the fear of discovery. Now there was no strength brought on by the risk of failure, and she was still stiff and tired after trying to sleep in the back of the Land Rover. She wasn’t good when it came to sleeping away from her own bed. She was a homebody. Besides being cramped, the back of the car had been stuffy and her sleep had been restless at best.

She felt an overwhelming sense of relief when she placed her burden down carefully on the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

She was hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a hot shower and fresh clothes. But she was happy and that was the most important thing.

She tackled her needs one at a time: first, she spooned coffee into the filter machine, filled the reservoir with water and switched it on, then she headed upstairs for a shower. She knew that she would feel better after that, more alert and ready to face the day. Geraint was unlikely to be back from his trip until at least lunchtime. Like their dad he was always disappearing somewhere, but that was the nature of his job; people needed him to fight their technological fires. It didn’t matter if it was their websites, their databases, their security protocols or whatever else he did; if it was to do with computers he was every bit as much a wizard as Myrddin Wyllt. That thought led her to stretching out on her bed without even getting undressed, and pretty soon she’d drifted into sleep, all thoughts of showers and coffee gone.

When she woke it was well past eleven o’clock and the sun was glaring in through her window.

The heat from the shower quickly steamed up the small room. She stripped, shedding her clothes like a snake sloughing its skin, and stepped behind the curtain.

Needles of hot water stung where they struck, turning her skin red and raw, but the warmth made her feel alive.

She lathered up, luxuriating in the little agonies of the hot water, suds sluicing off her back to gurgle down the drain, and long after she’d finished washing she stayed beneath the spray, head down, her long red hair sodden and hanging over her face.

Finally, after more than half an hour under the flow with the water finally beginning to turn cold, she switched off the shower and stepped out.

She felt the sudden blast of cold air from the open window, but didn’t move for the towel. Instead, she let the air dry her body, then dressed in fresh clothes, her damp hair sticking to the clean T-shirt as she went downstairs.

The hot-plate of the coffee machine hissed as she entered the kitchen, the pot dripping condensation down the outside of the bell jar. She’d put enough water in the pot so that it hadn’t dried up yet, but there was only enough for one treacle-thick cup, so she poured it and focused her attention to the bundle on the table.

She didn’t unwrap it straightaway. She stared at it, like she half expected there to be nothing inside the blanket. Then slowly she eased back first one corner and then the next.

It wasn’t much to look at—a simple piece of stone with a hole in the middle.

It wasn’t the kind of treasure that made it on to TV shows. It wasn’t sexy enough for any of those. Looking at it, it was easy to see why it had been mistaken for a quern. Although a decent archaeologist ought to have been asking where the second offset hole was. Otherwise, how could they have inserted the stick to rotate the stone and grind grain between this stone and the second lying beneath it?

But it could have been the bottom of the pair, she thought suddenly, angry that she hadn’t considered it earlier. Her heart raced a little faster at the mere thought of it. She scrambled to get her fingers underneath and lever it up on its edge. Her fingertip snagged at the rough stone until she realized that she could use the blanket as a cradle to tilt it upward until it stood on its round edge.

With one hand on either side she ran her fingertips over either side, comparing them for differences in texture.

If this had been used for grinding corn, then one face ought to have been worn smooth as it rubbed against its mate. Both were rough. She couldn’t find anything resembling wear or weathering that she would have expected on a millstone.

Her hands were trembling as she moved them out toward the very edge of the stone, knowing that this was where she’d find the proof she needed to confirm that the stone had been used the way she suspected.

She moved gingerly at first, with the lightest of touches, then started laughing as she rubbed her hand across the smoothest of surfaces.

This was no quern; it had been used for sharpening blades, not grinding down grain. She knew that she was right. The only question that remained was whether this was the stone she was looking for, or whether it was just any old mislabeled whetstone, and she couldn’t work that out by touch alone. It would have to wait. Today was about showing her doubting twin precisely what she was capable of.

It had taken a while to convince him that she was right about the stone, and even then there was that gleam in his eye he got when he was humoring her. Thirteen minutes older than her, he liked to think that he was the dynamic force in their little family of two, but she was no slouch. And this would prove it.

She held the cup of coffee a few inches from her mouth, feeling the heat and breathing in the aroma, savoring every second of it.

* * *

BEFORE AWENA WAS able to brew another pot of coffee, she heard the sound of a car approaching.

Geraint coming home.

She wanted to rush to the door and hurry him inside, eager to show what she’d found. It was funny how life didn’t change—once upon a time it would have been showing him the new eggs in the birds’ nests or foxes in the woods behind the house. Now it was just a different sort of treasure. He’d always humored her then, always followed out to let Awena show him what she’d found and pretended it was the most interesting thing in the world, even if he’d already seen it. He was the perfect big brother like that. Or he had been. He wasn’t quite so generous now, a little less tolerant of her whims now they were older and supposed to be beyond flights of fancy. He wouldn’t chase her down to the bottom of the garden to hunt fairies anymore, but that didn’t stop her wanting to share her tumbling train of thought with him every bit as much as she always had.

“Awena,” he called, opening the door.

So many great things in life began with something simple like a door opening, she thought, metaphorical or literal.

“Kitchen,” she replied, grinning like an idiot despite wanting to come across as nonchalant, confident, grown up. She wanted him to walk into the room on his own and see the stone on the table for himself, let him join the pieces together and work it out without her having to spell it out for him.

But he ruined it, walking in blindly and sitting down without even noticing it. He was obviously preoccupied with something he was as every bit as desperate to tell her as she was to tell him. So Awena said nothing, giving him a chance to say his piece, but then he saw the huge stone and whatever he’d been about to tell her was shunted out of his mind.

“What the hell is that?”

It wasn’t quite the response she had been hoping for, but it had certainly got his attention.

It was painfully obvious he was unhappy she’d gone ahead and done everything without him, but she didn’t care. She’d pulled it off. She’d proved what she was capable of. She’d done it. Not them. Not him. She had.

She twisted her lips into a half smile and shook her head, knowing that her eyes were still smiling.

“Don’t play games, Awena. There was no need to take stupid risks. We should have planned this out together. There were other ways.”

“Were there, now? Like what exactly? Walking up to the museum with a blank check and saying name your price? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But I could have paid someone else to do it.” He thumped the table in frustration, but the stone didn’t even move so much as a millimeter. “There was no need to put yourself in danger. What would I do without you? Did you even think about me when you were playing cat burglar?”

“There were no risks,” she lied smoothly. It helped that she almost believed that herself. “It was a good plan. Besides, I wanted to do this on my own. I wanted to make you proud of me. I wanted to make him proud.” She wasn’t sure why she said that. She hadn’t thought of their father for days, for weeks even. But that was her dad; he was like a specter that loomed over the pair of them, ever present even when he wasn’t there. She saw the way that Geraint looked at her when she mentioned him, but let it pass.

“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear about it.” He raised both palms in surrender, then walked past the table to join her, seemingly more interested in the coffeepot than her prize. It hurt that he showed no interest in it, but she knew he was just trying to punish her.

Awena was pissed with him. She’d been so excited to share her success with him, but now all she felt like doing was giving him the silent treatment. He always made out that he was the strong one, the rock, but she’d seen how he could be when he thought she wasn’t looking. He might not like what she had done, but he wouldn’t stay angry with her for long.

She’d give him an hour.

Maybe less.

Then he’d be all over the stone, talking about it, and wanting to hear every audacious word of her heist like it was some grand story.... Still, he’d already ruined it for her.

“So, how was your trip?” she asked, turning the focus back on him. She knew he was dying to tell her now he was over the shock of what she’d done. He shrugged. “Stop sulking,” she said. “You know you want to tell me.”

“Fine,” was all he managed, but nothing more. He still couldn’t take his eyes from the stone. She continued to sip her coffee in silence and waited as he started to circle it until finally he crouched down to look at it more closely.

She smiled as he ran his fingertips over the surface just as she had done.

He was hooked.

Chapter 7

The museum was closed.

Annja had moved her car from the pub to the hotel, checked in, dropped off her bags and, despite the lure of the big comfortable bed, turned around and headed straight back out again. She’d hoped to get a quick look around the museum before it closed for the afternoon, but when she got there she saw a makeshift sign on the door that said it was closed for the day, so it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

She peered through the long window, pressing her face up to the glass. There were lights on inside, and she could just about make out the shadow-shapes of a handful of people milling around. She tried to shield more of the window from the sun, cupping her hands around her brow as though peering through binoculars. She saw a woman talking to a policeman. There was another man—dressed in overalls measuring up the size of one of the display cabinets. The woman saw her face pressed up against the window and mouthed the words Closed and Sorry, shaking her head before she returned her attention to the policeman with his notebook poised.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to put the pieces together: a man measuring up a display case, a policeman taking a statement; there’d obviously been a robbery. It was surprising that a local museum would have any particularly valuable exhibits, though. Normally these rural sites just offered a few fairly interesting treasures dug up from the site, a few battered coins and rings, with the most precious golden torcs and such being spirited away to London for the British Museum’s collections.

The brochure the landlord had given her mentioned a cache of small Roman coins, which would be both difficult to sell and unlikely to fetch a great deal of money—certainly not enough to make the effort worthwhile—so the theft was more likely to be a case of petty vandalism, probably bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.

Hopefully no one had been hurt.

Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.

A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.

Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.

A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.

Time to go exploring.

Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.

Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.

She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.

As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.

The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.

Not that it lasted.

Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.

She glanced at the display before answering.

“Garin,” she said. He only ever seemed to call when it was bad news. That had become the nature of their relationship. Save a girl once, she’d joked, and you think it gives you the right to ruin her life. “What can I do for you?”

“Ah, Annja, sweetheart, how I’ve missed your dulcet tones,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Not missing me too much, I hope?”

“I’ve not even been here a day—besides, it’s hard to miss you.” She checked her watch and tried to work out what the time was where he was, but then realized that she had no idea where he was in the world.

“Well, according to this little gadget I’m looking at you’re in Wales of all places.”

“Spying on me?”

“Hardly. It’s just this new box of tricks we’re trying out that tracks back signals when they bounce off satellites. It’s a refinement on the old caller ID. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“I’m not sure I want to think about why you’d need to know exactly where someone’s calling from—mainly because every reason I imagine will probably be suspicious if not illegal.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“So what can I do for you? Got some relatives you want me to visit?” She looked across the fields at a flock of sheep nuzzling along the barbed wire of the perimeter fence, and pushed a toe against a pile of rotting cigarette butts. She could never understand why people would litter in a place like this.

“Ask not what you can do for me, ask only what I can do for you.”

“What on earth are you babbling about?”

“I’m nearby, someplace they call London. Ha! I figured if you were at a loose end I could nip over and entertain you.”

“Entertain me?.”

“I’m a lover of beautiful women, Annja, you know me. I don’t discriminate—black, white, in color—doesn’t matter, beauty is beauty. And I like to collect beautiful things.”

“And vacuous ones.”

“Oh, you wound me...though I will admit to a weakness for the odd dumb blonde. I can’t help myself. That isn’t a crime. So, let me entertain you.”

On a bucket list of wants and desires, that was right down there on the bottom of Annja’s bucket along with the dregs. But for all his lecherous ways, Garin was charming, and good company, hence the ease with which he took to womanizing. “I’ll give the offer its due consideration, but right now I’m hoping for a couple of days of me time.”

“Well, if you change your mind...”

“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied.

“Excellent,” he said. “Have fun and try not to miss me too much.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, but he’d already killed the call.

A boy peered over the edge of the grassy bank, looking down at her, Roman emperor to her gladiator waiting in the pit. He disappeared back behind the edge without giving her the thumbs-up.

Annja left the amphitheater, climbing the hillside that would have been banked seating back in the day. She then spotted her Roman emperor; he’d moved on to the shelter of a hedge at the end of the field with a couple of his friends. They were huddled together. She saw the spark of a lighter, which therefore explained the cigarette butts.

Behind the boys she could see a lonely spire.

She left them to smoke their coffin nails and went to check it out.

Chapter 8

“I don’t mean to be difficult—” which of course was exactly what he meant to be “—but what exactly are you are planning to do with this thing now?” Geraint tilted his head slightly, making a show of thinking about it. “I suppose it could make an interesting flowerpot. Maybe you could turn it into a water feature?”

“Or I could hit you over the head with it,” Awena said. Her twin was proving more obstinate and much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he’d be, but then it hadn’t been his idea to steal the stone in the first place, so perhaps it was all just a case of sour grapes. The important thing was that he agreed with her—the stone wasn’t what the museum curator had thought it was. Unfortunately, he didn’t agree that it made it any more important than a well-preserved whetstone. That it had been used to hone blades rather than crush grain made no difference to him.

She took a deep breath, refusing to let him wind her up.

“Do I really have to spell it out to you?” She shook her head.

“Spell away, dear sister. I’m clueless.”

And he really was. He couldn’t see why she’d been compelled to steal it before it was consigned to some dank storage area in the bowels of the museum, never to be seen again.

She wanted him to be as wrapped up with possibilities as she was, not just humoring her. It might have been her idea, but he was her other half and she didn’t just want him to be in this with her; she needed him to be part of it.

“Don’t laugh, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain what you are looking at is the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd.” She let that sink in. The whetstone was one of their father’s obsessions. He’d spent most of his life chasing around the country in search of it.

Geraint stood in silence, running a finger over the stone. “Could it be?” What he really meant was: What makes you so sure that it’s one of the things Father wasted his life on?

And it had been a waste.

They’d grown up with the stories and knew all about the thirteen Treasures of Britain and their supposed properties. She’d grown up with the myths even if she hadn’t grown up with a father, as he’d spent most of their childhood and adolescence chasing shadows.

“Don’t do this, Awena,” he said finally, not unkindly. “Once you start on this trail it’s going to be impossible to stop. You know that, don’t you? Don’t let it steal your life like it stole his.”

“It won’t.”

“I’m serious. He can’t think about anything else. He’s obsessed. It’s like madness that’s worried away at him over the years, removing all trace of his personality. Now all that’s left is this compulsive need to prove he’s right. Take a good look at this thing, see it for what it really is.”

“And what’s that?” she asked guardedly.

“A lump of stone.”

“Of course it isn’t just a lump of stone. We’ve both read Dad’s notes. Look at it. Think about what he worked out.... This has to be the whetstone. It was found in the same area where Tudwal Tudglyd’s whetstone was last known to have been, and there’s no denying it was found with other relics from the same era. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Can’t it? Or is that just what you want to believe? Dad spent his entire life looking for this. Do you really think he’d have missed it if it was simply sitting in a display case in a local museum? He isn’t an idiot, Awena.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He doubted her. “Certainly it’s the real thing,” she snapped.

“Is it? Can you prove it? Is it supposed to have some kind of property that no other stone has?”

“If it’s used to sharpen a blade and a brave man uses the weapon, then it is guaranteed to draw blood. But if the blade belongs to a coward it won’t even sharpen.”

“But how do you prove that? Or do you have a convenient coward in mind? And who uses swords nowadays. It’s not exactly the weapon of choice, is it?”

“Blade. Not sword. There’s no shortage of knife crime in the city, is there?” She shook her head, refusing to be drawn into it. “It’s not about proving it and you know it. I believe that it’s the genuine article and for the moment that’s all that matters.” She prepared herself for a patronizing response, but surprisingly none came. It had been a while since their father had returned to the cottage, so by rights he ought to be home soon. He’d know just by looking at it and that was all the proof she would need. It was all the proof she had ever needed.