Marcus was sneering now. ‘Hurt you? Oh yes? How?’
The voice hesitated, then went on. ‘We’ve both found it hard, since your mother . . .’
‘How did I hurt you?’
‘Well, those things you said about me.’
‘I didn’t say anything!’
‘About your face – that I did that . . .’
‘So? You did! Sort of.’
‘Marcus – ’
‘If I hadn’t been so scared of you I wouldn’t have been coming back so fast, would I? I’d have been more careful. But I was worried – I wasn’t concentrating at that corner. That’s why I slipped. See? It is your fault.’
‘That’s not the same as hitting you, Marcus . . .’
‘Yeah, well. It’s as good as.’
Emily had stopped climbing. Her face was pressed against the snow. She felt as if she had been punched in the stomach – all breath had been driven out of her. She thought she would vomit.
He had lied. The policeman had been right. Marcus had made it up. The face, the beating, everything. Lies . . . All lies.
Whether he had been driven more by his love for the castle or his hatred of his father she didn’t know or care. Here she was, hanging onto a crumbling wall, risking her neck for his. It made her head swim. All this – all this mess was his work and his alone! It was his tissue of lies and half-truths, his mix of history and invention that had lured them in and kept them there. His stories that had won them over, time and time again, no matter how ludicrous they seemed. They were fools, both of them – Simon, now speeding through the dark in a police car, Emily, stretched out in the snow at the top of a ruin. Utter fools. And Marcus had brought them both low.
As she lay there, the conversation intruded again on her despair.
‘We shouldn’t argue about that, son. No one’s interested in who said what. We just want you down.’
‘Tough.’ To Emily his voice now sounded like a sulky child’s.
‘What beats me is why you’re here at all. What’s this place do for you anyway?’
Marcus said nothing.
‘Good for games, is that it? Good for playing games?’
‘Games? Yeah, you would think that.’
‘So why d’you come here then? I just don’t get it, son, I don’t understand.’
Marcus did not answer immediately and when he did so, his voice was sullen and hesitant. ‘It gives me something. It makes me feel . . .’ He came to a halt; started again. ‘It’s . . . it’s better than being out there, that’s all,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for me out there. Nothing.’
There was a baffled silence. ‘What sort of answer’s that, Marcus?’ The voice carried a note of irritation. ‘You’re not making sense. Your mother said you were a clever boy. What d’you think she’d say if she heard you now?’
This roused Marcus at last. ‘How the hell would you know what she’d say?’ he shouted. ‘Get lost!’
His father gave a cry of exasperation. ‘Right, I’ve had enough of this nonsense. We all have. I’m coming to take you down.’
Emily heard a scuffling and a despairing shout from Marcus.
‘No! Get back! I’ll jump if you come any closer!’
Quiet voices spoke urgently to the father and the scuffling noise stopped dead. Silence fell; the father did not speak again.
Emily stole a look over her shoulder. Marcus was half-standing on his stump of stone, the harsh light picking out the despair upon his face. At this, all Emily’s furious thoughts of climbing down and leaving him fell away, leaving behind a calm resolve.
Liar or not, she knew what he needed to hear and no one else did. She had to go on.
Slowly, painfully, she drew herself further along the jagged stones and in a few moments broke upwards into the light. With tortuous care, she rotated so that her back was pressing against the stonework and Marcus was in full view.
She was level with the floor of the battlements now, still below Marcus but high enough to see across to the roof of the tower. Three people stood there. It was hard to make them out amid the glare of the spotlights, but one was the father, another the chief police officer. They had just noticed her. Someone called something; Emily ignored it, but Marcus heard and looked slowly in her direction.
‘All right, Marcus,’ she said softly.
There was blood on his temple and his face was white and puffy. As he turned, his eyes went into shadow.
‘Em!’ His voice was hoarse, but sounded pleased. ‘I thought they’d got you long ago.’
‘Nope.’ She was unsure how to judge it, what tone to give him. ‘Nope, they never found me.’
‘Nice one. Where were you?’
‘In an oven.’
She heard him laugh softly. ‘No way! That’s better than the chimney.’ His voice fell. ‘Simon’s gone, though, I heard him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘They smelt the smoke, Em. I was so cold I had a fag. They smelt it like you said they would. Came looking.’ A thought struck him. ‘Why’ve you come up here, Em? You could have got out, maybe.’
‘Because I saw you. I came to help.’
‘That’s kind, but there’s nothing we can do now. The castle’s fallen. It’s all over.’
His head was resting on his knee and his voice was so muffled and listless that she could barely hear him.
‘We should come down now, Marcus,’ she said. ‘We should walk out of here together.’
‘What for? They keep telling me stuff, but I just can’t make it real. Not real like this was. Dad’s here, you know; he wants me back too, he says. They promise all sorts of things – but it’s funny, I can’t see how any of it will actually work for me. I don’t know. I can’t be bothered with it all, Em. I’m tired. Everything’s so dreary.’
‘It doesn’t have to be. Maybe you’ve just got to believe them . . .’
His voice sharpened instantly. ‘Why should I? For that matter why should I believe you?’ His head lifted off his knee, his hidden eyes bored into her. ‘They haven’t sent you here, have they? Told you what to say?’
‘Don’t be stupid! You think I’d turn traitor now after all this, after all we’ve gone through?’ She had been keeping her anger under strict control; here it burst out a little, but even as she spoke she realized that she was now adopting the kind of language Marcus understood.
He shrugged, somewhat mollified. ‘Maybe,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Yeah, fair enough, I trust you. But it’s all slipping away, Em. I was trying to say to Dad, before you got up here, about the castle, about what it meant. They all asked me what we were doing, what we wanted. And the stupid thing was that I couldn’t say . . . I couldn’t articulate it so that they understood. Maybe it was the lights, or seeing Dad, I don’t know, but I couldn’t concentrate. I sounded like a fool. Well . . .’
He gazed off into the darkness, perhaps looking out at distant, unknown house lights. ‘It’s all over for us here,’ he said, ‘and you know there’s nothing for me out there. So I decided I’d . . . but it’s a long way . . . and I haven’t done it yet.’
In the shadows of the passage below her, Emily saw a movement. One of the watchers from the tower had come down to prevent her escape. Perhaps fearing that she too would threaten to jump, the shape hung back almost out of sight. She ignored it, kept her eyes fixed on Marcus.
‘If you do that,’ she said loudly, ‘you’re going to miss the best bit of all.’
The hunched figure on the battlement glanced at her again. ‘Which is what?’
‘You think they can keep this quiet now?’ Emily spoke with new assertion. She knew now what she was going to say. ‘After all the people they’ve had to bring in from round the county to flush us out? Three of us, Marcus – that’s all, don’t forget – just three of us have withstood this siege all day. They came in the morning and we took whatever they could throw at us till nightfall. You think they’ll be able to keep that quiet? I don’t think so. It’ll be all over the papers
tomorrow – and not just the local ones either. All of them. Why? Because there’s never been a story like this!’
‘Not for hundreds of years, here,’ he said, fingering the stone.
‘Or anywhere. Not just here, Marcus. Anywhere. This is better than those stories they write up in those old guidebooks and you know it. Think about you and Simon for a start. How long did he keep firing at them, pinning the main army down? Must have been half an hour – you and him, side by side against dozens. And they couldn’t break in there until you were attacked from the back! They never got past you, Marcus, think of that.’
She was watching him closely, saw him nod.
‘And the other thing is,’ she went on breathlessly, following up her advantage, ‘the other thing is that you don’t even know the full story yourself! What about my side of it? You haven’t heard what I did during the siege. While you and Simon were busy I held off a second troop of them from my window. I sent six of them tumbling off the ladder by tipping hatfuls of snow down on their heads! Arse over tit they all went – you should have seen it! Headfirst into the drifts, six pairs of blue legs wriggling! Want to read about that in the papers tomorrow? You ought to.’
Emily was warming to her theme now, revving up her imagination nicely. ‘And did you see those two blokes upended in your ice-trap? No? I did. They nearly went over the edge, it was great! A policeman and a fireman, side by side, hanging on by their fingertips. And there was the one I trapped down the well – he regretted chasing me, I can tell you . . . Don’t say you’re giving up before you hear all this!’
Emily wheezed to a halt, totally out of breath.
‘The well? Really?’ Marcus said.
‘What I’m saying,’ Emily said, ‘is that after a fight like this there’s nothing dishonourable about surrendering when you’re down to your last two men. What is dishonourable is running away from the enemy, which is why I didn’t escape when I had the chance. And that’s just what you’d be doing if you take a nose-dive off.’
She finished. Marcus crouched where he was, his face in shadow. Emily flicked a look at the figures on the tower, but the lights were too bright and she could not make them out.
‘You’re right, Em.’ Marcus dropped first one leg, then the other, over the stone and pushed himself off, landing in the snow on the edge of the battlement. ‘It was weird, you know. I’d lost it for a moment, I couldn’t see what it was we’d been up to – I’m sure it was the lights that did it. But you’re right. What we did was better than anything that’s gone before, at least since Hugh was here. We can tell – ’
A dark shape reared up behind Marcus, covering him with shadow. Light glinted around its edge as it sprang to secure him. Emily cried out. Marcus half-turned, flinched back from the figure and lost his balance. His foot scrabbled for an instant on the edge of the battlement, then he toppled sideways. The policeman made a grab at thin air. Marcus disappeared without a sound into the well of darkness, followed by tumbling fragments of snow.
There was a dull sound from the passage floor.
Several people cried out. Emily screamed. She scrambled a little way down the edge of the wall then jumped bodily into the passage, landing heavily on her feet.
Marcus lay on his back, eyes closed, one arm bent oddly underneath him. The woman had run from the passage and was bending at his side, but Emily shoved past her and crouched beside his head.
‘Marcus!’
He opened his eyes. ‘People are always interrupting me, Em. You should be used to it.’ His voice was faint, but he gave her the old grin.
‘Don’t try to move,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know you could tell a story so well. You certainly won me over.’
Emily couldn’t help herself then. The question boiled up within her. ‘That stuff about your dad. Why say it, Marcus? Why make it up?’
A slight expression of doubt passed across his face.
‘I don’t know, Em.’ He frowned. ‘It just sounded better that way somehow. More real, more impressive. It gave me a reason . . .’
She waited for more, but his mind had moved on. ‘Em – did someone really fall down the well?’
‘No. I lied.’
‘Oh. Thought it was too good to be true.’ His eyes closed, then opened again.
‘Do you think the papers will take a first-hand account?’ He shifted a little. ‘Ah, my arm—! I mean . . . I mean, we don’t want them to get it wrong.’
‘We’ll worry about that later. Stay still. And don’t move your arm.’
Marcus seemed satisfied. He closed his eyes. Emily stayed sitting in the snow beside him. She could hear a voice on a radio somewhere and footsteps moving up through the empty rooms of the castle.
‘Are you all right, Katie?’ a voice at her shoulder asked.
‘It’s Emily,’ she said.
About the Author
Jonathan Stroud was born in Bedford in 1970. After studying English Literature at York University, he moved to London, where he worked as an editor in a publishing firm. He is the author of the best-selling BARTIMAEUS sequence, which is published in 35 languages and has sold 6 million copies worldwide, and also of four other novels: HEROES OF THE VALLEY, THE LAST SIEGE, THE LEAP and BURIED FIRE. Jonathan lives in Hertfordshire with his family.
Also by Jonathan Stroud
Buried Fire
The Leap
The Bartimaeus Trilogy
The Amulet of Samarkand
The Golem’s Eye
Ptolemy’s Gate
THE LAST SIEGE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 446 48030 4
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
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This ebook edition published 2011
Copyright © Jonathan Stroud, 2003
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First Published in Great Britain
Corgi 9780552551465 2004
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