‘That’s not enough. It’s not enough!’ Suddenly angry, Raffi grabbed his sleeve and forced him round. Galen stared at him, eyes black. Raffi forced himself not to step back. Then he said, ‘I have to look after us both. I have to read the signs, as well as I can. You can’t do it. You wouldn’t know, if anything was wrong.’ He let go of the keeper’s sleeve and said quietly, ‘You have to let me warn you, Galen.’

Galen didn’t move. It was the truth, but Raffi knew he felt it like a blow in the face.

‘So what is wrong?’ he growled.

‘The tombs. They’re watching us.’

‘And the tree?’

He shrugged. ‘It feels strange.’

Galen stabbed the ground with his stick. Then he said, ‘Listen. Yesterday, I had a dream. The only dream I’ve had for months. Faintly, in all the pain and the darkness, I saw this place. Those trees up there. Nothing else.’

Raffi was silenced. He knew the importance of dreams, knew that Galen would clutch at anything that might help him.

‘I can’t ignore it, Raffi.’

‘No,’ he mumbled, unhappily.

They climbed up. The turf was springy, studded with yellow gorse-bushes. Warm, Raffi loosened the fastening of his dark green coat for the first time in days. The slope was steep; Galen stumbled once and picked himself up, stubbornly. The dark grove hung above them, the rooks clamouring, disturbed. Anyone for miles would hear them. Catching his breath, Raffi stopped and looked back.

The downs stretched endlessly to the horizon. Great cloud-banks hung, hazed with sunlight; white darkening to ominous grey, their slow rain-curtains dragged across the green land.

He turned and walked into the gloom of the trees. Yet as he passed the outer trunks he realised that this was not many trees, but one, immensely old, its trunk fibrous and dark; centuries old, maybe even older than the barrows.

Coming closer, they saw the central trunk was hollow; split wide enough for a small room. Trunk upon trunk had grown out of it, root upon root; the bark was ridged and scored, and Raffi guessed that six or seven men couldn’t have joined hands around it. And yet it was alive. His feet sank in a thousand years of needles.

Around it, almost lost in gloom, stood three standing stones that might once have been some cairn or building. Pieces of rag hung from the branches. On one a piece of quartz swung and glinted in the sun.

‘The Sekoi.’

‘Again.’

Galen was bent under the thatch of branches. He put his hand on the central trunk. ‘How old this is. The secrets it knows. If I could…’ He stopped himself, instantly. Then he sat down, closing his eyes.