Читать книгу Daughters of Fire - Barbara Erskine - Страница 23

Viv sat up with a start. She could still smell the smoky incense in her nostrils, still hear the intense miserable young voice in her ears.

It was nearly dark in the room and she was extremely cold. She focussed on the table in front of her, confused, and then slowly she reached for the switch of the table lamp and throwing down her pen, stared at the notebook. Switching off the Dictaphone she wound it back a little way and pressed the play button. Silence. Then she made out a slight scratching sound. The sound of her writing. ‘Damn.’ She had so hoped she would speak out loud. Had tried to tell herself to speak out loud, to describe what was happening in her dream.

Or trance.

Or imagination, at last given free rein.

Or whatever it was.

It hadn’t worked. She wound back the tape a whole lot further. Still silence. Just the endless automatic scribbling. With a groan she turned back in her notebook to the beginning and pulling the lamp closer, she tried to read what she had said.

Frustratingly she found there were long passages where she appeared to have been writing so fast the words had turned into long undecipherable lines and were lost forever, but in others, for instance as Carta lay silently waiting for the goddess to speak to her, the script was clear and unambiguous:

Carta beware.

Who had said that?

She wants to kill you. She does not want you to marry. She does not want you to bear children. She does not want her own seed usurped.

And who was she?

Medb of the White Hands, the king’s youngest wife.

‘Oh God!’ Viv bit her lip, totally engrossed. ‘Does she know? Did I warn her?’

It didn’t matter of course. Nothing she did or said mattered. She couldn’t change the course of history.

Could she?