Wamphyri

Good for us, Georgina said again, but this time to herself, bitterly.

It hadn't been 'good' for them, that last fatal frolic in the snow on the cruciform hills. Anything but. It had been terrible, tragic. A nightmare she'd lived through a thou-sand times in the year gone by, with ten thousand more to come, she was sure. Lulled by the car's warmth and the purr of its motor, she slipped back into her memories...

They'd found an old firebreak in the side of the hill and set out to climb it to the top, pausing now and then with their breath pluming, shielding their eyes against the white blaze. But by the time they'd pantingly reached the crest the sun had been low and the light starting to fade.

'From now on it's all downhill,' Ilya had pointed out. 'A brisk slalom through the saplings grown up in the firebreak, then a slow glide back to the car. Ready? Then here we go!'

And the rest of it had been... disaster!

The saplings he'd mentioned were in fact half-grown trees. The snow, drifted into the firebreak, was far deeper than he might have guessed, so that only the tops of the pines - looking like saplings - stood proud of the powdery white surface. Half-way down he'd skied too close to one such; a branch, just under the surface, showing as the merest tuft of green, had tangled his right-hand ski. He'd upended, bounced and skittered and jarred another twenty-five yards in a whirling bundle of white anorak, sticks and skis, flailing arms and legs before grabbing another 'sapling' and bringing his careening descent to a halt.

Georgina, well to his rear and skiing a little more timidly, saw it all. Her heart seemed to fly into her mouth and she cried out, then formed a snow-plough of her skis and drew up alongside her husband where he sprawled. She'd stepped out of her clamps at once, dug her skis in so that she couldn't lose them, gone down on her knees beside him. Ilya held his sides as he laughed and laughed, the tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks and freezing there.

'Clown!' She'd thumped his chest then. 'Oh, you clown! You very nearly frightened the life out of me!'

He had laughed all the louder, grabbing her wrists, holding her still. Then he'd looked at his skis and stopped laughing. The right ski was broken, hanging by a splinter where it had cracked across its width some six inches in front of the clamp. 'Ah!' he had exclaimed then, frown-ling. And he'd sat up in the snow and looked all about, Georgina had known, then, that it was serious. She could see it in his eyes, the way they narrowed. 'You go back to the car,' he'd told her. 'But carefully, mind you - don't be like me and go banging your skis up! Start the car and get the heater going. It's not much more than a mile, so by the time I get back you'll have that old beetle good and warm for me. No point both of

us freezing.'

'No!' She'd refused point-blank. 'We go back together. I-'

'Georgina.' He'd spoken quietly, which meant that he was getting angry. 'Look, if we go back together, it means we'll both get back wet, tired, and very, very cold. Now that's OK for me, and I deserve it, but you don't. My way you'll soon be warm, and I'll be warm a lot sooner! Also, night is coming on. You get back to the car now, in the twilight, and you'll be able to put on the lights as a marker. You can beep the horn now and then to let me know you're safe and warm, and to give me an incentive. You see?'

She had seen, but his arguments hadn't swayed her. 'If we stick together, at least we'll be together! What if I did fall down and get stuck, eh? You'd get back to the car and I wouldn't be there. What then? Ilya, I'd be frightened on my own. For myself and for you!'

For a second his eyes had narrowed more yet. But then he'd nodded. 'You're right, of course.' And again he'd looked all about. Then, taking off his skis: 'Very well, this is what we'll do. Look down there.'

The firebreak had continued for maybe another half kilometre, ru

The car's over there,' said Ilya, pointing east, 'around the curve of the hill and behind the trees. We'll cut through the trees downhill to the track, then follow our own ski-tracks back to the car. Cutting off the corner will save us maybe half a kilometre, and it will be a lot easier than walking in deep snow. Easier for me, anyway. Once we're back on the track you can go on skis, a gentle glide; and when the car's in sight, then you can go on ahead and get her going. But we'll have to get a move on. It will be gloomy now under those trees, and in another half-hour the sun will be down. We won't want to be in the wood too long after that.'

Then he'd hoisted Georgina's skis to his shoulder and they'd left the firebreak for the shelter and the silence of the trees.

At first they'd made good headway, so good in fact that she had almost stopped worrying. But there was that about the hillside which oppressed - a quiet too intense, a sense of ages passing or passed like a few ticks of some vast clock, and of something waiting, watching - so that she only desired to get down off the hill and back out into the open. She supposed that Ilya felt it, too, this strange genius loci, for he had said very little and even his breathing was quiet as they made their way diagonally

down through the trees, moving from bole to black bole, avoiding the more precipitous places as much as possible.

Then they had reached a place where leaning stumps of stone, the bedrock itself, stuck up through the soil and leaf-mould; following which they had to negotiate an almost sheer face of crumbling rock down to a levelled area. And as he helped her down, so they had noticed the handiwork of man there under the dark trees.

They stood upon lichen-clad stone flags in front of ...a mausoleum? That's what the tumbled ruins had looked like, anyway. But here? Georgina had nervously clutched Ilya's arm. This could hardly be considered a holy place or hallowed ground, not by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed that unseen presences moved here, lending their motion to the musty air without disturbing the festoons of cobwebs and dangling fingers of dead twigs that hung down from higher areas of gloom. It was a cold place - but lacking the normal, invigorating cold of winter - where the sun had only rarely broken through in ... how many centuries?

Hewn from the raw stone of the hillside itself, the tomb had long since caved in; most of its roof of massive slabs lay in a tangle of broken masonry, where the flags of the floor were cracked and arched upwards from the achingly slow groping of great roots. A broken stone joist, leaning now against the thickly matted ruin of a side wall, had once formed the lintel above the tomb's wide entrance; it bore a vague motif or coat of arms, hard to make out in the gloom.

Ilya, who had always had a fascination for antiquities of all sorts, had gone to kneel beside the great sloping slab and gouge dirt from its carved legend. 'Well, now!' his voice had sounded hushed. 'And what are we to make of this, eh?'

Georgina had shuddered. 'I don't want to make any-thing of it! This is an entirely horrid place. Come away, let's go on.'

'But look - there are heraldic markings here. At least I suppose that's what they are. This one, at the bottom is ... a dragon? Yes, with one forepaw raised, see? And above it -I can't quite make it out.'

'Because the sun is setting!' she'd cried. 'It's getting gloomier by the moment.' But she had gone to peer over his shoulder anyway. The dragon had been quite clearly worked, a proud-looking creature chipped from the stone.