‘Look,’ said the voice from Lex beside him. ‘He is here. Look.’
It was not Lex's voice. It was no voice Ambrose knew. When it spoke, his head swam as if he had drunk wine. He could feel the seams of the world loosen. His mind caught glimpses of brown depths that lay behind them.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered.
‘Light draws the shadow. Look!’ said the voice that was not Lex.
‘… and look!’ cried Father Grismonde.
He was pointing to the manor buildings. ‘Look! The roofs of Ferroux are whole! I myself have struggled with doubts, but the roofs are whole!’
He turned, still pointing, and blinked at his audience, as if they must see the tremendous force of his argument.
Men stared at him.
‘The roofs are whole,’ Grismonde repeated. ‘There is rule here. So should there be in the Kingdom!’
Somewhere along the scholars' table, someone tittered. Grismonde looked around at the faces and seemed to realize that his listeners no longer understood him. He faltered.
‘And – and if all this is held too weak to weigh the scales for Kingship,’ he pleaded, ‘then what is the alternative? What of Pardon? Denke himself,’ he exclaimed, recovering his pace. ‘Denke himself has taught us that there must be one to punish wrongs justly, and give pardon where it may be given. Without Kingship, who shall see our quarrels ended? Shall we look to each other? Yet who shall be the last to punish, who the first to forgive? Force would be first. Faithfulness would fail. Our blood would run and run. There must be one who judges.
‘So I ask my friend Denke – if what he has said is true of Kingship, what then of Law? Of the very discipline he teaches? For how can Law be, without one who lays it down, one to judge among the strong men, and one to whom the weak may appeal against the strong?’
‘Hah!’ cried Padry at the end of the high table, and his palm banged upon the boards. But no one joined with him to celebrate Father Grismonde's point and his applause died lonely, like a candle in a night wind.
The Widow raised her hand. Father Grismonde sat. Denke rose for the short reply that the marks on the wax stem allowed him.
‘To argue from thatch to Kingship is the thought of a simple mind. It is unworthy of my friend Grismonde.’
The tables stirred. Insults – however justified they might seem – were not permitted in Disputes. Denke lifted a finger, commanding silence.
‘Where a king finds the roofs are whole, he may burn them and so do evil.
‘Or he may leave them whole, and take wealth from under them, to give him the power to do his evil elsewhere.
‘These are the only choices he has.
‘What is the Pardon of such a king worth? In Develin we have told one another that men weary of their quarrels, and the word of a king may bring the peace. And we have lied.
‘We have lied because we have said only what we imagine Should Be. We have shut our eyes to What Is.’
Utter stillness gripped the tables.
‘And so to the Law, and the question he poses me.
‘I must say that there may be Law, somewhere, among the Angels perhaps. There may be Law among some other people, who will one day come across the sea after all our bones are buried. For we were not the first in this land, and it is sure that we will not be the last.
‘But among men as we are it is Law that bends before Power, and not the other way about. Such law is not Law but mist and memory. Our hopes were false, and we must now forget them. From our kings comes not pardon but punishment. It is a punishment that we have deserved.
‘In our three hundred years, we have known no Law that has held, nor hope that has not failed.’
He sat down again. The listeners were still, appalled by what he had dared to say.
‘Indeed,’ said the Widow at last, ‘I had not heard this before.’
Barely a breath was drawn around all the firelit meadow. The Widow lifted the hood from the candle and blew out the flame in front of her.
‘I see that Denke has gained his argument,’ she said. ‘And I see that his words must cost him his place at my table.’
For a moment no one moved or spoke. Then Denke rose once more and bowed to the Widow. As he walked slowly away towards the darkness of the buildings his back was stooped and his head low, as if he were bowing still.
The Widow shrugged. Her face said she had ceased to care about anything. Her voice sounded old and tired.
‘Let us eat now and console our bellies, since our minds cannot be at ease.’
A soft thicket of murmurs rose along the tables. One master had gibbered like an idiot. Another was dismissed in disgrace. All this in the House of Wisdom!
And Law had been denied by the Master of Law!
‘Look,’ whispered the voice in Ambrose's ear.
With the loss of the candle the Widow's face seemed shadowed. Her head bowed towards her plate, as if she found it very heavy.
And the man beside her!
No, that was Father Grismonde, of course, sitting crushed with his hands over his eyes.
But beside him?
Ambrose's eye flicked along the row of masters and counsellors. He saw them. He knew them. Yet, now – now it seemed that beside each one he looked at would be a pale, cowled old man, bald as a nut inside his hood, with eyes that did not fling back the light.
As if in a tunnel of days he saw them – in quiet rooms, in shadowed halls, on paths among dry fields, where each had met unseeing in their turn with the man in the grey robe. They had spoken with him in their minds and listened to the words from his mouth.
He was here. The light drew the shadow. The light was Develin. The shadow was the Heron Man. And the Heron Man had them. He had them all!
‘Ambrose Ulfinson,’ said the voice beside him.
Once again Ambrose jerked around to face Lex. No one knew his name here! No one anywhere knew his father's name!
The thing behind Lex's eyes was looking at him.
‘The father of this house will wait in the garden. He will speak with you. Go and hear him.’
Paigan Wulframson. By the last of your fathers' sons shall you be brought down.
Ambrose gripped the board. Dimly, he heard the talk rise along the benches. Voices were calling for the meat and wine. Scullions carrying hampers were beginning to move down the tables, handing out bread. A cauldron of soup had appeared.
The face of Lex was still looking at Ambrose.
‘Go!’ said the Angel within it.
Ambrose fled.
∗ ∗ ∗
In the shadows beyond the firelight, in a garden of vegetables and herbs, were the remains of a cracked pavement. On it there stood an old fountain with a wide, dry bowl, very like one that Ambrose remembered in his mountain home. Here he came, stumbling among the rows of planted roots. He crouched with his back against the ancient pedestal and laid out his five stones around him.
Then he drew his knees up to his chin, and let his mind reel like a world in flight.
Look!
He had looked, and he had seen the Heron Man at the tables.
Ambrose Ulfinson. The father of this house will wait in the garden …
It had not been Lex's voice. It had not been the Heron Man's voice.
The Angels move within us, fleetingly, and do not stay. He will speak with you.
Ambrose swallowed. He did not know what to think. The one thing he was sure of was that he had been sent here, by a voice that he could not disobey – a voice that had spoken names that had never passed out of his own head. The Wolf is child of the Wasteland.
It had sent him here to meet someone.
Who?
Ambrose looked around him. There were plants, and bushes, and shadows of bushes. Nothing else stirred. Behind him the firelight played and voices rose, arguing, as wine made its way along the tables. The old knight who held the manor was there, and could not leave while his guests ate. Could he be the father of the house? Ambrose was not
sure if he even had any children. And anyway, the manor wasn't his. It was the Widow's. It was part of Develin. And the lord of Develin was long dead.
Who then was the ‘father of the house’?
The Heron Man was here, in the court of Develin. He had been here all along. He was speaking to all of them – the Widow, the masters, the counsellors. He had been doing it for weeks.
The Heron Man had spoken to everyone! He had them all!
Everyone except him.
The father of the house was going to speak to him, here in the garden.
Slowly, the awful thought seeped more and more strongly into Ambrose's mind. There was no one else it could be. It had to be the Heron Man. The Angel had sent him here, to meet his enemy face to face. The Heron Man was coming to him.
Keep out of his way, the Wolf had said.
You must never approach him, Mother had said. You must never listen to him, or speak with him, no matter how important it seems.
He will speak with you. Go and hear him.
‘Why?’ he cried plaintively.
Nothing answered him.
Why?
The light draws the shadow. Develin was the last light in the Kingdom. But the Heron Man had been among them all the time. Now the light was going out. Ambrose remembered the face of the Widow as she had puffed out the candle.
‘Your house is not in order!’ he said aloud.
They were the words she had spoken to Wastelands, even as the Heron Man stood beside her chair.
He will speak with you. Go and hear him.
He listened, and heard nothing but the voices at the tables. He looked, and saw only the herb-fronds glowing dully in the light of the fires.
He did not have his staff.
Time passed. Ambrose ordered his five stones again, setting them as far out around him as he dared, and waited. It was cold here, away from the brazier on the longest night of winter. The babble from the firelit meadow had reduced. The Widow must have retired. So must many of the house. The talking had gathered into clumps where those who had no early duty still clung to their bowls and places. And the firelight at his back flickered on the shrubs and bay-bushes, and showed him the shadows that lay among them.
At last he heard voices approaching, murmuring to each other: a man and a woman. Ambrose knew the man's voice. It was Chawlin.
‘… seeing each other too often,’ he was saying. ‘It will do no good. We need to think what we are doing.’
‘You're just depressed,’ said the woman. ‘Who wouldn't be, after hearing all that awful stuff at the tables? All the more reason to find company we like.’
Chawlin let out his breath, like a long sigh.
‘You're so much younger than I am, remember. You're the future. You should not think to offer me …’
‘What do you think I am offering you?’
Her voice was low, but pressing. Chawlin hesitated again.
‘Sophia, look at my face. Look at it.’
‘I like it,’ the woman said firmly.
‘No, listen! You don't know me! Can you imagine, talking to me as you are now, and seeing wounds, great red wounds, appear on my face?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘… and you know it's something in your mind, not real, because I am still talking to you and laughing with you and all the time you can see the flesh curling up from the rents, and the blood all down my skin?’
‘Chawlin!’
‘I've seen it. I've dreamed it, and thought it was a nightmare. There was a time when I saw it, waking, day after day, on friend after friend, and knew that I was mad. That thing from Tarceny I carried – just a plain stone thing. Until I gave it away, it was bringing all that back. And now I'm dreaming again …’
Something moved, to Ambrose's right, at the edge of his vision. It was not a man.
‘I think you're being very brave,’ said the woman.
Ambrose breathed in, slowly. There was a smell in the air, thick and characterless, like water at the edge of pools. He huddled backwards under the shelter of the old fountain. His heart was beginning to work, hard.
Fifteen feet from him, a shape stirred in the shadow of a bay tree.
Ambrose swallowed. Carefully, he looked away, watching from the corner of his eye.
It was smaller than a man – perhaps the size of a child all wrapped in a cloak. There was something bird-like about the way it had moved, and very light, as if it were made only of bone, or had no body at all. Within the shadow of its face or hood something – perhaps it was an eye – glinted red from the distant fires.
How long had it been there? It was watching him. It had seen that he had seen it. An arm – a limb like an arm – began to stretch out towards him.
‘Sophia,’ said Chawlin's voice. ‘You must be more careful.’
‘I'll do what I like …’
‘Chawlin!’ cried Ambrose.
There was a brief, stunned silence.
‘Who's there?’
‘Chawlin, help me!’ Ambrose scrambled to his feet. He had to grip the fountain with one hand to prevent himself from overbalancing in his narrow ring of stones. With his other he reached out to them, begging for help.
‘Luke!’
Chawlin was there, and with him was the Widow's daughter – the Lynx of Develin. They were standing very close to one another. They were holding hands. They must both have jumped when he called.
‘Luke!’ hissed the Lynx. ‘Go away!’
‘I can't!’
‘What do you mean? You're not wanted here. Go away!’
‘I can't,’ Ambrose said again, trying to keep his voice low.
‘Can't you see it?’
‘What?’
They hadn't seen it. They hadn't smelled it.
‘There!’ he said, pointing at the shadow by the bay bush.
There was another beyond it, he now saw, to his left. And he thought a third had been moving on his right, but it was gone for the moment. He did not know where.
‘This is a bad relapse,’ muttered Chawlin.
‘For Umbriel's sake, Luke!’ said the Lynx. ‘It's just a cat. Please go away.’
Ambrose did not move.
‘I'll have you whipped!’ she said furiously. ‘Go. Away. Leave us alone!’
‘I can't!’
She must have been astonished, because she did not answer. Ambrose heard her draw breath. Then she exclaimed loudly and marched off into the darkness.
Chawlin hesitated. ‘What is it, Luke? What are you seeing?’ There was a note of unease in his voice.
‘There! By the bay bush. You see it if you don't look at it. Can't you see?’
Chawlin stayed where he was.
‘There – there's nothing there, Luke. It was a cat, that's all.’
‘It's still there!’
‘No! No, Luke. You just heard what I was saying and you frightened yourself.’
‘Chawlin, help me!’
‘Help yourself !’ said Chawlin roughly. ‘You've done enough damage already.’
He left, moving quickly with his arms swinging. He passed the bushes and boulders where the reeking, shadowy things crawled, and walked by them as if they were not there. He did not look back until he reached the edge of the garden. Then, when he was no more than a shadow among shadows, Ambrose saw him turn.
‘We will have our bout by the woodstore tomorrow morning, Luke,’ he called, in a different, more cheerful tone. ‘Do not forget. And when we get back to Develin, I will see if I can get my hands on some real iron. You will like that, hey?’
He was gone.
They didn't listen, thought Ambrose, furious. They didn't see!
No one did. No one saw the Heron Man, moving among them. No one saw what he was doing in Develin.
‘Cat?’ muttered Ambrose savagely. ‘What kind of cat are you?’
He picked a flaked of cracked paving stone from the ground beside him, and, looking away, flung it as hard as he could at the thing that crouched by
the bay bush.
He was sure that he hit it, but there was no sound of a stone striking or falling. It was as if he had thrown the stone into a loose canvas sack.
It wasn't moving. It was watching him, like a big dog that expected something. They were all watching him.
They can't pass the white stones, he told himself.
He might try throwing one of the white stones. That would do something, he was sure. But he might never get it back, and then he would only have four.
Andoh, said the Thing before him from the darkness.
Ambrose jumped.
Andoh.
The word was followed by other sounds, deep and lipless. Ambrose felt the stone behind him tremble at the voice. He sat frozen as the Thing stole closer to the white stones. It groped at the edge of the ring. His toes and knees were drawn up as tight as he could to get away from it. And again it spoke, with a horrible, wheedling, pleading tone, as if it were saying, Please, please, please …
Please, let us in, he thought it was saying. Please, let us reach you. Please, let us tear you so that the flesh curls up from the rents and the blood runs down your face.
‘Go away!’ he yelled, despairing. Just as the Lynx had cried at him: ‘Go. Away.’
Then he cursed it.
He could curse, now. Weeks in Develin had taught him the filthy, obscene words that the scholars flung at one another when they were angry. He used them all. He raged at it, the ugly, shapeless stupid thing that mouthed at him out of the darkness. He raised his voice and heard it crack with the effort. And he stopped, gasping for breath.
It could not pass the stones. It could not reach him. The Heron Man could not reach him. He could sit here all night if need be.
Away to his right, something like an insect the size of an ass heaved itself up among the scented leaves.
Andoh, it cooed.
Then it said a word that sounded like Anson; and other words, and Anson again.
The bushes parted and another came, lumbering out of blackness. A fourth (or was it a fifth?) flitted after it.
The Widow and the King Page 23