The Widow and the King

by John Dickinson

  They came to a landing with stairs running up and down, and a door that opened on the far side into what seemed to be a long corridor with wooden walls. Padry listened. His mind was plainly on the fighters, and the threat to the house. But the sounds from outside were less now. Probably the Widow's fighters had all moved down to the outer gate. Perhaps the parley was already beginning. Padry turned back to Ambrose and smiled, absently. Then he looked away over the boy's shoulder and began to speak.

  ‘This is the School Stair,’ he said. ‘Through this door is my lady's library, which with great generosity she has placed at the disposal of her scholars. Remember that each book is worth the harvest of several farms. Therefore you may come here only in the hours between Nones and Vespers, and no flame is permitted here at any time. You may take down and handle any work from the presses at will, so long as they bear directly on your studies, but you must make no attempt to unfasten them. Certain quires and bound volumes of exceptional value are kept in locked chests. These you may only examine at the direction of a master. This is the rule for all scholars. If you break any part of it, we will thrash you in due measure. We will thrash you also if you do not study. Above is a dormitory where you will sleep, and where we masters have our rooms. My lady has gone to much expense to see that the dormitory is divided into cells, one for each scholar. Remember that we will thrash you if you are outside your cell after curfew, and double if you are found in the cell of another scholar. Also, since the partitions are only of wood, we will thrash you if you snore …’

  He must have said these words many times to students before this. Ambrose supposed that they would have known what words like Nones and Presses and Quires meant. He did not; nor was he sure whether the threat of a beating if he snored was a joke. He did not laugh.

  ‘So much for food for the mind,’ said Padry, beginning to descend the stairs. ‘Food for the belly you will have too. I will show you the refectory, which is also the scholars’ hall …’

  Ambrose ducked through the low doorway on the landing and peered down what he had thought was a long passage, with many other passages opening off it. Now he saw that the walls of the passage were not walls but the ends of great open cupboards, with benches between them. The cupboards had shelves, festooned with light chains, and in the shelves were books, folded papers, scrolls, more papers – so many things. A crowd of young men were gathered at the nearest bench, with a scroll open on a broad shelf that was part of the cupboard. One of them was reading aloud. The others craned over his shoulder. Further down the room other groups were doing the same thing. The buzz of low voices filled the air.

  The nearest boys had noticed Ambrose. Their eyes had turned to him all together, like a many-headed beast. The voice of their reader stopped. Ambrose recoiled onto the landing.

  ‘… We take our meal after Vespers, which at this time of year is at sundown,’ Padry was saying as he diminished down the stair.

  More sounds came flooding up from below – knives on blocks, and voices arguing. There was steam, and woodsmoke, in the air. The corridors still hummed with the distant song.

  So many rooms, so many people! In a place like this it was possible for men to be singing, and for crowds of boys to be reading in the school, while in the outer courtyard thirty armed horsemen sat tense, waiting for an order to charge. And somewhere down at the foot of the stair there were yet more people who fed them all.

  Ambrose hurried after the man Padry, feeling his courage deserting him again. Wastelands was gone. Stefan was gone. He had never been among so many people, and he knew none of them. There had been one man who had known Mother – the monk in the brown robe – and he too was now being sent away.

  Brown robe, or grey robe?

  No – it had been brown robe, surely, tied at the waist with a rope.

  Yet – yet had there not also been a grey robe, there, among the men in the council chamber?

  It is a trick!

  Ambrose stopped, gripping the stair-rope. Suddenly his heart was going very hard.

  That thought – when the Widow had been testing him – where had it come from? Like a whisper in his head that he had heard before?

  There had been a half-dozen of them: Padry, the bald monk, and the man with the faded blue tunic, all of whom must have been masters at the school. And the red counsellor, and two men in mail … There had only been one monk, because earlier the Widow had talked of ‘the monk', and had turned to Martin …

  It was too late to go back and make sure.

  He forced his legs to carry him on down the stair. But as he hurried after Padry through the uproar of Develin's kitchens, his mind's eye showed him more and more clearly the memory of another figure by the Widow's chair, silent, in a grey robe and hood. And watching.

  And none of them had seen it. And it had spoken to Ambrose, whispering in his head about the Widow's test.

  He had passed because of the Heron Man.

  The white stones clacked at his hip as he walked. He put his hand on them. He thought he was about to be sick.

  The Heron Man! How could he be here?

  PART II

  WISDOM

  IX

  The Company of the Moon

  he Lady Sophia Cataline diCoursi Develin was not frolicking among daisies. She was holding up her skirts and trying to creep forward among bushes and tall weeds to a hiding place from which she could see the riverbank.

  She was not feather-brained either. There were several reasons for what she was doing. One of them was that she was sure the Widow would have a fit if she knew what her sixteen-year-old daughter was up to.

  Like everybody else at Develin, Sophia thought of her mother as ‘The Widow’. It was right for her. It made Sophia think of a great, black spider sitting over everything and covering them all with her webs. And it was a sort of revenge for her own name – Sophia, for Wisdom – which her mother had chosen for her at birth. She hated it. When her mother was finally dead she would have herself called … well, something different. She would have liked to be Cataline, but her governess had once told her that that had been the Widow's choice, too. She did not feel that any name her mother had chosen for her could truly be hers. There were days when she did not feel ‘Sophia’ at all.

  She knew well enough that she was outside the walls without escort (which was forbidden). She knew that outside the walls horrible things could happen, without warning, even on her mother's lands. Outlaws, vagabonds, raiding parties – they all came from time to time, although they almost never approached the castle. Her tutors had warned her that the children of rich houses might be taken for ransom. They had not told her that less fortunate people might be killed outright, for little reason. Nor had they told her that a child of any standing might be raped. She had worked these things out for herself, from the clues that filtered daily into the walled enclosures of the last great house in the south of the Kingdom.

  But it was a bright day, after the heavy mists of the morning. The wind was stirring the reeds and trees, and harrying the white clouds south and eastwards off the land. Her heart had been bursting to get out from the close pen of the castle walls, if possible without the snooping eyes of someone who had been told off from other duties, with much dithering and consultation, to watch her.

  Then a group of the scholars had gone out to fish, laughing with their rods over their shoulders and whooping in the gate-tunnel. That had been enough.

  Sophia did not think much of the Widow's scholars. This was partly because they were her mother's. Their presence in the house, and that of the solemn-faced masters under whom she must study, were just another expression of that great oppressive Will that was Always Right and yet understood nothing. But also, she did not like them. They hung around the courtyards in groups between and after their studies. The older boys picked on the younger ones when they thought no one was looking. And they talked coarsely when Sophia passed, and meant her to hear what they said. She had fought against being taught as they we
re taught, and, when she had lost that battle, she had fought to have her lessons in private rather than in their company. So it was galling to her to see a group of them free to enjoy themselves when she had appointments with Father Grismonde for instruction in Dogma, and then with Master Denke for Rhetoric and Law. It was simply not fair that poor scholar-boys could go freely where she might not. She would not accept it. She had waited a few minutes and then, with a wink to the gate-sergeant, who was a friend, had followed.

  It was time for some fun, and a little revenge.

  The scholars went fishing when they could, for sport and food. Sophia disliked fish, which rarely appeared at the high table. But she had found that when they were fishing some of the scholars would wade right out into the river. They would take off their shoes and hose, leaving their legs naked to their loin-cloth; then they would gather up the tails of their shirts in the crook of one arm to keep them dry, take their rod in the other, and splash out into the waters, bellowing to one another about the chill. Then, if she found somewhere to hide, she could watch the parade of bare buttocks moving a few inches above the river's surface, almost as white as the clouds that drifted over the land.

  It was a thrill to see them without being seen; and a double thrill to imagine what her mother would say if she knew.

  Her father might have laughed, she thought. Perhaps he still laughed, if he was watching her from where he rested under the Angels' wings. But the Widow would scream and froth. (And then, perhaps, she would get a nosebleed. Hah!)

  This time Sophia was going to get closer than ever before.

  The trouble with not wanting to be seen or heard was that movement was much more difficult. Her heavy skirts caught on briars. It was hard to keep her balance. She could hear the voices of the scholars, a stone's throw away on the bank. They would be fumbling with their hooks and bait. She took a long step forward, felt her skirt catch on something (again!) and swayed. The wind gusted among the bushes, and under cover of its noise she wrenched angrily to free herself. She felt the threads pull, and knew she would have to make up some story about a nail or splinter around the castle to account for the damage. Why did things never work the way they were supposed to?

  She could glimpse a few yards of bank now, between the bushes. A man's foot and lower leg (still fully clothed) stood in thin mud. She crouched, and found she could slip forward for a better view.

  This was it. This was secret. From outside they would only see the bush. No one would know what was on the inside.

  Once, very long ago, Sophia had sat upon her father's knee at the writing desk that now stood in her mother's antechamber. She could not have been more than four years old, because her father had died before her fifth birthday. She remembered him laughing as she had pulled at his beard, and then he had stolen her ribbon because without meaning to she had begun to hurt him.

  ‘Look,’ he had said, and had opened a drawer of the desk.

  He had put the ribbon in the desk and closed the drawer. She had cried out that she wanted her ribbon, and had pulled the drawer open. The ribbon had not been there, and Father had laughed again.

  Then he had taken her fingers and showed her how the secret drawer worked. Press the catch, pull the drawer, and out came the secret drawer with the ribbon in it. Push the drawer back and open it again without pressing the catch – out came the ordinary drawer, with nothing in it. The secret drawer remained deep in the desk, and no one knew it was there.

  That drawer and that memory were important to Sophia. They were things that she knew her father had given her. They told her – and he told her, as he watched her from among the Angels – that she could keep secret inside herself. Her mother, and her mother's people, could call and pull at her as much as they liked. Out would come only the ordinary Sophia. She alone knew her Self, as it was hidden within.

  She was close, very close. She could hear the voices of the scholars, the squelch of their feet as they moved on the muddy bank – even the ring of a dangling hook as it struck upon some buckle or stone. But through the low branches she could only see the one man, crouching now as he busied himself over his rod. The others were screened from her by the leaves of the bush. Maybe some of them would wade out into the stretch of river that she could see.

  She recognized the man in front of her, because he was older than most of the others. He had been at the castle for years (lapping at the Widow's charity) but had never spoken with her. She did not know his name. He had a lean face, lightly bearded. His hair, which was a tired blond colour, was long and gathered into a pigtail at his neck as if he were a tinker. His clothes were a faded green, but his belt was of good leather and there was a pouch at his hip which must hold his bait. Either he or the breeze had wound his line several times around his rod. He was now unwinding it, carefully because of the bright hook on the end. Somewhere close, someone cursed as they tried the same thing, but the man said nothing. Sophia lay full length under the bushes and willed him to take his trousers off.

  Round, round, round. Now the hook dangled freely in the wind, and there was more line yet up the rod. It would have a long reach. Sophia thought, with disappointment, that maybe the man would not be wading into the water at all, but would fish from some spot on the bank. Any moment now he would turn and be gone, and she would have to struggle on to another hiding place for a more rewarding view.

  But he did not turn. His hands had stopped what they were doing. He was looking towards her bush. He seemed to be looking right into her eyes where she lay. Her heart bounced.

  If I don't move he can't see me. He can't possibly see me.

  She saw him frown, and rise to his feet. He was coming her way.

  She backed quickly among the undergrowth, snagging on branches, scrambling. She heard the man's voice calling, curious but not unfriendly. For the moment she was screened by the bushes. But he'd come round them and then see who it was that had been spying on them.

  She didn't care if they told the Widow. She would be beaten for it, but it would be almost worth it (she thought) for the horrors her mother would suffer at her behaviour.

  But she did care about the scholars. It was suddenly obvious to Sophia what they would think if they saw her. She could imagine how they might treat her, or talk about her, or invent bawdy stories of her to tell to one another. And if the scholars knew it would be all around the castle by nightfall. That would change the way people thought about her for ever. So much for being secret! She wasn't going to get caught if she could help it.

  That was why she took to her heels and ran towards the road.

  When she had been small, she had run everywhere. She remembered nursemaids who had called her ‘little hare’ and pretended to be big hounds chasing her with deep yelps around the chairs in the hall. But she had not run for years – barely since she had become a woman. And her skirts were wet and heavy and her breath came in gasps. Behind her, she heard the man call again. He was not running yet. She pushed through the last bushes, leaped a ditch and emerged onto the road.

  There was no cover here, and nowhere for her to hide. If she had been thinking at all, it was that she might walk briskly back towards the castle, with her head high, pretending that anything that had happened at the bank was nothing to do with her. As long as she could get far enough away by the time her pursuer appeared, he might not be sure who she was or what she had been doing. It might not work, but she could not run all the way to the house and she did not have time to think of anything else.

  Then she saw the horsemen.

  They were approaching her at a walk from the direction of the castle. She could see at once that they were not of Develin. There was something unfamiliar about their armour and horses – ragged outlines that she did not know. The head of the leader was bare, his hair long and disordered. The hilt of a great two-handed sword danced over his left shoulder as he rode. She could see no banners.

  These could not be outlaws, surely, jingling towards her in the afternoon sun? They w
ere barely half a mile from the castle gate! Beyond them, the long, white line of the outer wall and the pile of buildings around the upper court were in plain view. Her home looked so close that she almost felt she could touch it.

  Half a mile? She could not possibly reach the gate if they were brigands. They would be on her in moments. She had no idea what to do.

  She stood there, watching them come.

  Behind her, the bushes parted. There was a soft thump as the fishing scholar leaped the stream. He stood beside her. She heard him whisper something – maybe it was an oath. He had seen the horsemen, too.

  Then his hand touched her shoulder.

  ‘Kneel down,’ he said urgently.

  ‘Help me with my tackle.’ They crouched on the wet grass by the verge. He placed the rod between them. There was nothing wrong with it that she could see. She put her hand out to pull, uncertainly, at the line. He was untying the hook. They were two peasant people, busy with their fishing gear as they might be on any day of the season.

  Her hair, her dress, her shoes if they saw them! There was no chance that she would be taken for a peasant woman. She could hear the horsemen coming. She could feel the weight of the horses as their hooves crunched wetly on the earth. They were close enough to speak to her. Why hadn't she run back into the trees?

  ‘Don't look up,’ muttered her companion.

  She could not help it. She looked up as the first horseman came level. She waited for him to check his mount, draw his sword …

  He did not. His horse plodded onward, slowly. She could see – she could almost touch – the dark, mud-matted coat of its legs as they stepped past. An armoured foot, a cruel spur, swung before her eyes. He was still riding forward. He was not looking down but ahead, intent on the road. He was an old man, armoured in black mail, with a great mane of white-grey hair and grey stubble. His big war-helm bumped at his saddle. He had passed them. Another was on them – dark leather and rusty mail, black cloak pinned with a white round badge at the shoulder. Sour eyes flicked down at her from under a fringe of whitegrey hair. Then he was looking ahead again, and his horse had not broken from its stride.