Daughters of Fire. Barbara Erskine

cigarettes. Scrabbling frantically at the latch, she let herself out into the street. Behind her the light clicked off on its timer and left her in darkness.

II

      Pat couldn’t sleep. The so-called box room in which she had been installed boasted a narrow pine bed and a duvet decorated with fairy tale princesses, aimed she suspected at Tasha or her friends in earlier, more innocent incarnations. On the small chest of drawers she had laid out her notebooks and laptop. Her capacious red canvas bag acted as wardrobe and her cosmetics such as they were sat on the window sill where earlier she had rested on her elbows puffing the smoke from a guiltily smoked cigarette into the darkness. She left the window open as she turned out the light and climbed into the bed to lie staring up at the ceiling.

      Sleep wouldn’t come. Tense and uneasy, she kept playing back the extraordinary scene at the kitchen table. Tasha and Pete had both seen something. There was no doubt about that. And Pete had not just said it to show solidarity with his daughter. She pictured Viv’s white face. She had often heard people described as looking like rabbits caught in a car’s headlights. That was how she had looked. Disbelieving. Trapped. Terrified.

      They hadn’t wanted her to go home alone. Cathy was worried and cross. Cross with Tasha and with Pete. Protective. Pete and she had had a row after Viv had gone and Pat had left them to it, wandering into the sitting room where she had joined Tasha who was sitting on the sofa in front of the television. The news was just finishing and a map of the next day’s weather was flashed on the screen. Tasha was hugging a large cushion. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I did see something.’

      ‘I know.’ Pat was dying for a cigarette.

      ‘You don’t believe me.’

      ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t see anything myself, Tasha,’ Pat said cautiously. ‘But your dad said he did.’ They were both staring at the screen.

      ‘It was a woman.’ Tasha’s arms tightened on the cushion.

      ‘Can you describe her?’

      ‘She was looking at Viv. Trying to get her attention. She had reddish hair.’

      Not Medb, then. Pat had felt a surge of relief. And not a shadow either.

      She turned over and punched the pillow. Pete was going to drop her off at Viv’s in the morning on his way to a meeting so that she and Viv could start on the play. Suddenly she was dreading it.

      Somewhere outside a dog barked and she found herself tensing. The sound was eerie in the silence of the city streets.

      She awoke suddenly some time later, aware that she was shouting out loud, her heart thumping in her chest. Staring round the dark room she held her breath, wondering if she had woken the others. There was no sound from the rest of the flat. Perhaps the shout had been in her dream. Groping for her watch, she squinted at it. One a.m. She had been asleep for less than half an hour.

      Lying back on the pillow again with a groan she screwed her eyes up against the darkness, willing herself back to sleep.

      Medb.

      Her eyes flew open.

      Medb must be in the play. She was a key character. Medb who wasn’t in the index. Who wasn’t in the book. Who did not exist at all, according to Viv who had shrugged and then admitted that she had heard of her. Somewhere. Pat saw again the pale clear eyes in her mind’s eye and she shivered. The woman’s implacable hatred was a physical presence in the room with her.

      7

I

      Vivienne! Help me!

      With a sob Viv shook her head.

      The wind amongst the chimney pots sometimes wailed strangely and it was a windy day. The early morning sun was throwing shadows from corbels and chimneys across the deep window-lined chasms where the wynd sliced back through the tall slab of buildings. Far above she could see the white cloud, shredded and spinning against the vivid blue of the sky. As she watched a gull, messenger of the sea gods, soared past the window, angling its wings as it headed back towards the Forth. What she had heard had been its ringing cry.

      Vivienne

      I need you

      Help me

      Lady, I bring you gifts!

      Turning sharply back into the room she went and stood by her desk, looking down at the notebook where she had scribbled her descriptions of the world of Cartimandua, descriptions from some part of her brain hell-bent on writing fiction and destroying her street cred as a serious historian forever.

      She had walked home fast the night before, her head down, her hands rammed into the pockets of her jacket, determined not to think about Tasha’s revelation, concentrating instead on the city around her. It was beautiful at night. She loved it all. The secrecy that the luminous darkness threw across the elegant streets and gardens of the New Town. The contrast, as she crossed Princes Street, between the brightly lit shop windows and the convoys of buses making their way towards the West End, with the darkness of the gardens beyond, the cavern of blackness over the railway line, set deep in its gorge below the castle. And she loved the steep ridge beyond the gardens on which crouched the Old Town where she lived, crowded, atmospheric, the shadows of the night hiding the twenty-first century, allowing memories of the past to filter up through the narrow streets and dark alleyways like a subtle, all-pervasive miasma.

      Vivienne, Lady, hear my pleas!

      Carta was crying, her voice echoing amongst the trees and bushes which clustered around the hilltop lochan.

      I need your help, Lady. Where are you?

      Viv had walked faster.

      Daughters of Fire. It had a good ring to it. It made her cooperation with Pat official. It gave them a base from which to work. If they got on. There hadn’t been an instant rapport between them, that much was certain, but she thought that they could respect each other for the experience each could bring to the project.

      She had reached the bend in the Mound when she heard footsteps behind her. Light. Hurrying. She stopped dead and turned. There was no one there. The street was empty. Below her the city spread out like a colourful carpet of light and dark.

      Cartimandua.

      Or Maeve.

      Medb.

      Medb of the White Hands.

      Where had Pat got that name? Viv felt a shiver playing again across her shoulders, and wished she had allowed Pete to bring her home.

      Medb and Cartimandua. Who or what had Tasha and Pablo and then Pete, dear old unflappable, unimaginative Pete, seen as they stared at her across the kitchen table? They had certainly seen something, and whatever they may all have said afterwards about the child’s vivid imagination, and the scatty cat, and the trick of the light, deep down inside, they all knew it.

II

      ‘Mellia?’ Carta had walked out of her bedroom and stared round the living chamber. It was empty. The fire burned quietly, unwatched, a full cauldron of water steaming gently as it hung from the chains above it. The women were outside in the sunshine about their various tasks. ‘Mellia?’ she called again. ‘I want you to come with me to see Conaire about tonight’s songs.’ Mellia would enjoy that; Carta, not above a little matchmaking, smiled gleefully. She planned to bring Mellia into the discussion and then, remembering an urgent meeting with her groom, to leave the two of them together. She made her way outside and stood in the warm sunshine looking around. Mellia would not be far. She always stayed within earshot in case Carta should need her. ‘Mellia?’ She walked across the cobbled street, between two other houses and onto the broad grass terrace above the clifftop ramparts. From there a panorama of woods and hills stretched out towards the western horizon. Below her a blackbird broke cover, screeching its alarm note and she stepped forward, glancing down.

      At the bottom of the flight of steep steps cut into the rockface a body lay