“Well,” said Kialan. “You can have new thoughts. Osfameron may have written that song about thoughts flying on, but you were dead when he wrote it.”
Hern shook his head. “Won’t do. Osfameron is my brother.”
Kialan looked very dashed at this and turned to Mitt for help. “He said shown,” Mitt said. “And he did tell us to listen to every word. Let’s see.” He looked at Hern. “You’ve shown us what comes of asking for the wrong thing, and then shown us yourself getting round that, and giving advice like you meant to. That’s how to keep the rules and break them too. I like that. It takes a cool head. But there’s more,” Mitt said, thinking aloud, which was the way he always thought best. “Maybe this was what Kialan was driving at. Yes – you’re still at it. You’re not beat yet. You’re showing us that.”
“Is it a new thought, then, to say, ‘Keep on, there’s always hope’?” Hern said. “I thought that was a very old saying.”
“Yes, but you’re the first person I’ve met who’s still saying it when he’s dead,” Mitt answered. “That has to be new.”
Hern laughed and stood up. “I believe you. Bend your head, Alhammitt, so that I can put this crown on it.”
“What!” Mitt backed away in horror. “Now, look. I told you. And I was only saying what Kialan said.”
Hern looked at Kialan. “Was he?”
“Not really,” Kialan admitted.
“Tidying it up, then,” Mitt said pleadingly. “Take the thing away. I’m not qualified.”
“Yes, you are,” said Hern. “I told you. Your right descends from the Adon’s son Almet, who went to live in Waywold.”
“Pretty sideways, I’ll bet!” Mitt said.
“Only as sideways as direct descent, from father to son,” said Hern. “If that was not so, why does the Adon’s ring accept you?”
Mitt looked down at the Adon’s seal, snugly above his knuckle. “This is just a copy.”
“No,” said Hern. He nodded towards Maewen. “Hers is the copy.”
Mitt shot a disbelieving look from Hern to Maewen and rapidly tried the ring on his little finger, then on his thumb. Each time it slid over his lump of knuckle and fitted as if it had been made for him. “This is plain ridiculous!” he said. He turned round. For a moment it looked as if he was going to storm from the room.
“Wait!” said Hern. It was the voice of command that Navis was so good at using. Mitt almost stopped. But he shook his shoulders and put one foot on the steps. Hern said quickly, “Accept the crown, and you may ask the One one favour.”
Mitt turned back. “You mean that?”
“I do,” said Hern.
“Now?”
“Crown first,” said Hern. “Bend your head.”
Mitt sighed and bowed his head down. “Extra bit of advice,” he said, looking sideways at Kialan. “Kings drive a hard bargain.”
Hern chuckled as he settled the thick gold band carefully over Mitt’s lank hair. “A King should have a sharp mind,” he said. “That may be in my Sayings somewhere. I am sorry that I cannot give you the kingstone as well as the crown. The stone is in the South. A man in Holand called Hobin knows where to find it.”
Mitt stared at him from under his own forehead. “Hobin? Gunsmith? He’s my stepfather!” He straightened up slowly and put one hand uneasily to the crown, thinking it might slip, but it seemed steady enough. Like the Adon’s ring, it was an exact fit. “Hobin!” he said. “You Undying really got me hemmed in, haven’t you?”
Hern nodded as he stepped backwards. “It was the same for me. Now you can ask your favour.”
“All right,” said Mitt. “Then, do you really have to sit here, century after century, waiting for the next new King to come along?”
Hern went very still. “This I know is in the Sayings of the King,” he said. “Never be beguiled by pity. Are you talking pity?”
“No,” said Mitt. “You’ve been showing us you’re stuck here and you don’t like it from the moment you first spoke.”
“Mercy, then?” asked Hern. “This sits well on a King.”
“No,” said Mitt. “Flaming Ammet, I don’t know what it’s called! I’ll have to take a leaf out of your book and show you. Take a look at Ynen. He’s miserable because all he can think of is that you have to sit here, year in and year out, waiting for a King that may not come. Only he doesn’t like to say so because the One made you sit here. Isn’t that so?” Mitt asked Ynen. Ynen went pink and nodded hard. “See?” Mitt said to Hern. “I don’t know the word for what I’m doing, unless it’s having the cheek to say things no one else dares to say. Is that kingly?”
Hern did not answer. He laughed.
“Laugh away,” Mitt said. “I’m going to ask the One to take you off duty.”
Hern went on laughing, but the sound was confused now and fading. The beams of light, which had half hidden him if you looked at him sideways, came to cover him however you looked, crisscrossing and elongating confusingly. He was like a candle seen through tears. Then the beams separated and slid away. Each silvery streak carried a dim piece of Hern’s shape with it, as if he were dissolving underwater. Mitt set his teeth and clenched his hands until the Adon’s ring bit into him. This was exactly like his worst nightmare when he was small. He had been fairly sure this would happen, but it had seemed worth asking all the same. He made himself watch until Hern had rippled away into nowhere.
The rippling did not vanish with Hern. It remained as a green-goldness, like air shaking in heat. The stone seat, and that whole end of the room, wavered as if they were under clear, shallow water. Mitt’s hands remained clenched. The scent he had recognised outside, of peat and farm, willows budding and slow, deep river flowing to the far-off sea, was back again, stronger and more potent. And the rippling had formed a shape, a huge gold-green shadow with a profile like Hern’s or Ynen’s. Mitt had no doubt, nor had any of the others, that there was a presence standing behind them, casting this shadow, but it was beyond any of them to turn round and look.
When the One spoke, the voice came from behind them. “Hern has long ago gone down the River to the sea.”
Mitt relaxed. Ynen murmured, “Oh good!” Maewen wondered how anyone could mistake Kankredin’s voice for the One’s. This voice was like the whole land speaking, the settling of rocks, the grind of water through granite, the slow shift of earth, and the wind blowing, and it burred in your ears in the same way as the low string on Moril’s cwidder.
“It is not easy,” said the One, “for my mortal children to speak with me face to face.”
This was true. All of them were aching to turn round and see the One, and all of them knew it was quite impossible.
“Witness this, all of you,” said the One. “You have a new King.”
No one was sure what to do, until Moril led them in a ragged chorus. “We witness we have a new King.”
“I thank you,” said the One.
The rippling shadow stooped then. It was as if the One bent to have a private word with each of them, all at the same time. Maewen heard the great voice at her ear, saying, “I cannot promise you what you asked. Too many imponderables lie in between. I am sorry.”
To Mitt the One said, “You have been offered the name of Amil, which is my name. Before you choose between that name or your own, you must know that I have sworn to root out Kankredin from my land. If you take my name, that will be your task too. What name do you choose?”
Mitt knew it was a real choice, even if Maewen had told him which way he chose. He weighed it up. Alhammitt was a good name, except that it was the name of half the men in the South. Amil was a name no one else had, but it carried the One’s burden with it. Well, Mitt had carried burdens all his life. Kingship was another one. One more seemed to make no difference on top of that. “I’ll take Amil,” he said.
Then he turned round, like someone waking up, wondering what the One had said to the others. The rippling shadow was gone, and with it, most of the golden mistiness. He could see
they were standing in a place that was no more than an oblong trench, with walls made of big blocks of yellowish stone that were broken off at about waist height. Beside him Maewen was fiercely blinking back tears. Moril looked much the same. But Ynen and Kialan both looked happy, in a stunned kind of way.
“I think we have to go back through the stone,” Moril said.
WHEN THEY TURNED round, they found three stone steps the colour of oatcakes leading into a green-gold landscape of humps and hillocks. Had it not been for the silence, and the mist still clinging to the near-distance, they would have thought they were back in the Kernsburgh outside the waystone.
They walked, slightly downhill, through a dip on the gold-green turf. The humps of Hern’s palace were small behind them. Ruins were like that, Maewen thought. Buildings, even palaces, seemed to take up far more room than they really did.
At first they were very silent and sober. Everyone kept glancing at Mitt, walking in the midst of them with the crown gleaming orange against his hair. He seemed taller. Nobody knew quite what to say. At last Maewen decided that someone must say something.
“Do you want us to call you Your Majesty?” she asked.
“Flaming Ammet!” said Mitt. “Don’t you dare!” He grabbed hold of her hand. “Don’t any of you treat me different,” he said. “I’m going to need you all around for sanity.”
Everyone broke into relieved laughter. After that they were able to talk together quite normally until Moril said, “Hush a moment.”
His cwidder was humming, and humming louder for every step they took forwards. Something dark was rising out of the mist ahead. The cwidder was almost growling as they reached it. It was the waystone, but it was not small any longer. It towered in a mighty arch above them, even bigger than the one Maewen remembered outside the station.
Moril murmured, “Wider than the world, or small as in a nut.” It must have been a quotation. Kialan recognised it and grinned at him as they all stepped through the waystone together, with Ynen, who was last, almost treading on Moril, who was just ahead of Kialan.
They were back on green grass under a grey morning. The waystone was waist-high behind them, and they were in a battle.
The fighting was noisy, it was vicious, and it was all round them. Everywhere they looked, people ran and struggled and hacked at one another. Riders and loose horses galloped and screamed. They had a glimpse of Luthan, still on horseback, furiously hacking at someone in a wavy helmet and shiny armour that gave him a chest like a pigeon. Luthan’s face was bright with blood that clashed with the red of his clothes. One of his arms was the wrong red too, and the mail was dangling from it in strips. They just had time to see this before the horses and fighting swirled and both Luthan and his opponent vanished. The air was full of drifting puffs of white smoke, shouts, clangs and the slurring whisper of crossbow bolts, which were even crueller than the guns, because you could barely hear them coming.
Kialan threw himself behind the waystone. “Get down, all of you!”
The waystone was a tiny piece of cover, but it was the only one available. The rest crowded up against Kialan, kneeling or crouching, Mitt on one knee with one hand steadying the crown.
“What’s going on?” Moril gasped. He was doubled protectively across his cwidder. “Those look like Southerners! That armour!”
Ynen took a look through the hole in the waystone. “They are too! I think they look like Andmark.”
“Earl Henda!” Mitt exclaimed. Everyone except Maewen bobbed up for a hasty look. “Hundreds of them,” said Mitt. “Where have they all come from?”
“It must have been them we heard in the night – Ynen and me,” Kialan said, doubled over his own knees. “I remember thinking I heard supply wagons.”
Mitt bobbed up again to look through the savage smoky confusion. He bobbed down again, almost at once, and a speeding crossbow bolt whizzed above all their heads, but he had had time to see a row of big black waggons drawn up some way beyond the green road. “They’re using the waggons for cover,” he said. “The ones with guns.”
“Who do you think’s winning?” Kialan asked.
Mitt shook his head. It felt heavy with the crown. The battle had obviously gone long beyond the stage where you could tell what was going on, but there had looked to be far more Southerners than Northerners. He had a feeling the Northerners were getting beaten.
There was another noise now. It was hard to pick out among the din. Mitt thought he had noticed it only because he seemed to feel it in his bones as much as his ears. For a moment, he wondered if he had accidentally said the name of the Earth Shaker. The earth seemed full of drumming.
There was a tremendous shouting behind.
They all whirled round to find a wall of horsemen galloping down upon them. The world seemed full of thousands of pounding horse legs, flying divots of turf and hollow drumming thunder. Kialan spread his arms out and pulled the four of them into a tight bundle in front of him. “Down!” he yelled, and fell forwards on top.
Even so, they all ducked and flinched as the horsemen swept up to them. Horses were all round them, all over them. One rider actually hurtled over their heads, leaping the five of them and the waystone too. The ground shook in earnest.
“Oh, great One!” Kialan groaned, with his head up to follow that particular rider. “That was my father. Now we’re in the soup whatever happens!”
The noise of fighting suddenly doubled. They could almost feel the riders from Hannart crash into the battle. Beyond the edge of the waystone Maewen saw a horse rear, screaming and gushing blood. Something else tumbled into view, with a clothy thwump, and she saw it was the rider, thrown down like a broken doll in a strange position. He was not moving, but his horse went on screaming, and so did others she could not see. She nearly screamed herself. She wanted to be sick. Her eyes felt twisted and hot. Mitt had been right to say she did not like war. It was horrible. And the worst of it was that she had helped cause it by riding the King’s Road instead of Noreth. The only reason she did not scream and kick and beat the grass with her fists was because that would be letting Mitt down. She crouched, swallowing.
A bullet went whang on the edge of the waystone. That nearly hit me! she thought. Beside her Kialan yelled out an extremely filthy word. Maewen jumped round to find him clutching his arm. There was a slice of granite standing out from his sleeve and blood was trying to flood out round the slice. His sleeve was soaked red already. Kialan repeated the filthy word and took hold of the piece of granite to pull it out.
“Don’t do that!” Mitt shouted at him. “Stop the bleeding first!”
“But it hurts,” Kialan said. There were grey-green smudges of shock under his eyes.
Maewen could see how much it hurt. And Kialan had had his arms spread out to keep them from being trampled. He didn’t deserve this. She wanted to do something to help. She bobbed up. The fighting was a frantic seething out beyond the green road. The space in between was full of loose horses and quiet, doll-like dead people. One of the horses wandering there was her own – or Noreth’s, except that poor Noreth would never have any need of it now. Here was something she could do.
“I’ve got a roll of bandage in my saddlebag,” she said, and jumped up to get it.
Mitt and Moril both screamed at her to come back, but there were scarcely any bullets now. The fighting had rolled back again and was now around that line of black waggons. Maewen covered the space to her horse in perfect safety and told herself she was being brave at last. The horse stood docilely. She heaved and fumbled at the straps on her baggage roll. Quick, quick, before Kialan bleeds to death! It seemed to take a hundred years just to undo two buckles.
Then the voice spoke to her. “There is a loaded pistol someone has dropped on the ground at your feet,” it said. “Take it and—”
“Oh, shut up!” Maewen told it. “Kialan’s hurt.”
“Moril!” said Mitt.
“I know. I heard him.” Moril bent hurriedly over his cwi
dder, trying to make the power gather. Mitt could feel it was slow and difficult to gather again so soon, and the screams and roaring of the battle did not help.
“I made sure the Adon was injured,” the voice told Maewen smugly. “These are my instructions. Shoot the Southerner with the crown first, and then—”
“I said shut up!” Maewen screamed. The buckles were undone. The bandage was – where? Where? Oh, here it was. She took the roll and backed away. Pistol? Oh yes. There, almost under the horse’s feet.
The voice rose to a blare. “Pick it up, you stupid girl. Shoot them all and take the crown!”
“Quickly!” said Mitt.
“No,” said Maewen. She aimed her boot at the pistol and deliberately kicked it as far away as she could.
Mitt groaned. Moril put all his fingers under the lowest string and plucked, desperately. The cwidder responded with a deep brassy twang, as if Moril had struck a gong instead.
The horse in front of Maewen drifted away sideways. Although it seemed like a solid horse, it behaved just like smoke and shredded into the air, in brown wisps. In its place was the ghost of a man, twelve feet high or more, bell-shaped and robed, bent over to glare at Maewen with human eyes under fat eyelids. He was hollow. She could see the empty space in the middle of him, and somehow this was the most horrifying thing about him. I was riding that! she thought.
It did not seem to bother Kankredin that Maewen could see him. He blared, “I am the One! You must do as I command!”
Mitt made a movement to stand up. The ghostly fat-lidded eyes caught the movement. The vague hand in the hollow sleeve made a small gesture, as Maewen said, “No, you are not the One. And you never fooled me for a moment.” She was shaking, but she was glad to find she could be brave in this way at least.
The towering shape bent towards her. The sheets of wriggly hair on both sides of its face fell forwards, and the huge, vague hands reached. Mitt found he could not move his legs. Beside him Moril’s hands seemed to be stuck to the cwidder, in crooked shapes. But Mitt did not need to walk. He drew breath and shouted.
The Crown of Dalemark (UK) Page 26