The Widow and the King

by John Dickinson

  ‘Where are you?’ he called. ‘Where are you?’

  He was moving in near darkness. If the shadowcreatures came, he had no protection. He must keep going. But he could not help slowing. Where was he?

  ‘Chawlin! Sophia!’

  Even now her name felt strange to him.

  And there she was! A great burst of relief came on him. He saw her beckoning, and ran towards her. She seemed to be at the top of a flight of steps. He would be out in a moment. She turned, and he followed, downwards, stumbling. The way was rough. He could not tell where he was. He thought they had passed into the outdoors, but somehow they had done it without going through the postern. The light was dull. The air was dead. He could not see the river. Still he hurried after the woman before him.

  His eyes were stinging with smoke. His feet told him that he was nowhere he knew. This was not the riverbank, mossy and slippery. They stubbed and stumbled among rocks. The way was level, when it should have sloped down to the water.

  He stopped, and looked around him. The colours had changed. The castle was gone. The sounds of fighting and massacre were shut off, as swiftly as if he had woken from a dream. A deep humming ran through his mind, so low that he felt rather than heard it.

  He was in the landscape of brown rocks, bare of trees and grass, under a dim sky. Far away, in all directions, he could see a wall of mountains, sweeping up towards the horizon. To his left two great lights like huge stars seemed to burn on the rim of the world. He looked back. The castle was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the river, or the banks of Develin. He was standing in the Heron Man's country.

  The air was thick, as if it were almost water. There was no smoke in it. Instead it was filled with the deep sound that he could barely hear. He could not see where it came from. It made him feel very heavy.

  The woman he had followed was still there, a little way from him, beckoning urgently. She was not the Lynx. She was robed differently, and was slightly taller. She was the only other living thing in all that place.

  He made his way towards her, dreading what he was going to see.

  ‘Come, my darling,’ she said. ‘Quickly. They are already hunting you.’

  He reached her, and looked into the eyes of his mother.

  PART III

  WAR

  XIX

  The Cup of the World

  ophia moved in evil dreams.

  She was waiting by the river-door again. The door was dark and smoking, and she wanted to run away. Chawlin was calling to her from the riverbank to come quickly. She knew that soon the man with the axe, all bloody, would come out of the postern and chase her again. But still she had to wait, while her mind screamed Run! Run! and the door fumed and coughed blood. Someone had not come out that should have come, and she must wait for them. Perhaps it would be Hestie; perhaps it would be her mother. Perhaps it would be the man with the axe. And she must wait.

  A shape moved in the darkness of the postern arch. It was not Hestie, or her mother. It was Luke. He would have walked past her, but he stopped and looked at her.

  I'm sorry, she said. I did not know who you are.

  He looked at her a moment more, and then he left her.

  She dreamed that she had gone to lie on the riverbank in the sun. Her mother came and stood over her, and told her crossly that it was time to get up and attend to her studies.

  Faith, madam, she said pertly. I study the art of sleeping.

  Strange to study a high art in such a low place, her mother answered. As well to scoop the river-earth out of your hair and make your cup with that. I declare there is enough of it.

  ‘You're a dream,’ Sophia mumbled. She knew her hair must indeed be dirty, because she was lying on the bank without even a pillow. Chawlin had offered to make her one from the bundles in the river-punt in which they had escaped; but she had been too tired to wait.

  She could hear the river, rippling endlessly a few yards from her ear.

  At last she opened her eyes.

  Yes, she was on the riverbank, lying in full sun. There was a blanket about her feet. Chawlin must have laid it over her as she slept, but in the gathering heat of the morning she had already thrown it off. She was lying on the ground in the silks she had put on for the King. She saw that they were stained with mud and smoke. She thought there might be blood on them too, but could not see any. She remembered how her feet had slipped for a moment when she had run past someone lying in a passage. That had been horrible.

  She lifted her head. Her body felt stiff from the hard ground.

  Chawlin was sitting nearby, jabbing absently at the turf with the point of a short knife. The cup stood at his hip. He had not noticed that she was awake.

  She sat up, and looked at the world.

  The willow-leaves whispered and the river glittered in the light. Empty green meadows, long with spring weeds, stretched on either bank. It was going to be a warm day. Weather like this should happen at another time.

  ‘I dreamed about my mother,’ she said.

  Chawlin looked up. His eyes were tender. He must have been waiting for her to speak for some time. Yet he seemed to know how little words could do for her.

  ‘Yes. I'm sorry.’

  She would never see her mother again; or Hestie; or any of them. Beside her the river ran on and on, unhurried. Already this much water had flowed under the walls that had been her home. How many tears would make a river as swift and deep as this?

  She was still wearing the pearls of the King. They clicked softly against one another as she touched them. He had hung them so carelessly around her neck before destroying her house and life. Did wealth mean nothing to him? Or had he thought that he could easily take the pearls back again, soaked in her blood, when she lay dead with all the rest? He had barely looked at her. She thought of throwing them into the river; but she did not.

  ‘Why did they do it?’ she asked aloud.

  Chawlin sighed. ‘Sometimes I think we're driven to ruin everything we have.’

  It had been something to do with the cup. Luke – she still thought of him as Luke – had tried to tell her that the king's men wanted it. He had said Develin must not trust them.

  A pit opened in her heart. He had said that Develin must not trust them.

  She had not listened to him!

  She must have made a sound, then. Chawlin glanced at her anxiously.

  ‘They are at rest, Sophia,’ he said.

  ‘They are under the Angels’ Wings.’

  ‘I … dreamed about Luke, too,’ she said.

  ‘He may have escaped.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She looked at the cup. ‘Have you seen him?’

  He shook his head. ‘I've looked, but not found him yet. Do you know who he really was?’

  ‘Yes.’ But that did not matter either. Nothing like that mattered any more.

  ‘Sophia,’ Chawlin said. ‘I need to tell you something.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That I'm sorry for what I said in the tower. It feels very stupid now.’

  In the tower? She could barely remember.

  ‘It wasn't stupid,’ she said.

  ‘It was stupid because I said we have to face things as they are. Yesterday I was made to see things as they are. I was outside the castle when it started. The sensible thing to do would have been to lie low. I thought of it. But I knew you were inside. I knew I had to get you out. That's what I mean about being made to face things. Do you understand?’

  He was saying that he loved her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said dully. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Sophia,’ he said earnestly. ‘In all this dark, damned winter you were the one thing that was new and different for me. All the rest … In the end I could have left it. But I looked at the walls, and all I could see was you. That was why I … That was why I had to get you out. I want you to understand that. Do you?’

  He was looking at her as if he was begging her to forgive him. She did not see why he needed to. She
looked at the river.

  ‘I'm sorry,’ he said gently. ‘Perhaps this should wait for a better time.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I'm grateful.’

  She did not feel grateful: not to be alive, not to be loved. She felt …

  She rose and stumped off along the bank in search of privacy. Her limbs moved clumsily as they shook off her rough sleep. She remembered, too, how clumsily she had moved and thought the night before, and how she had sat in the stern of the punt all those dark hours, answering Chawlin shortly, or not at all. She had not been sleepy then. She had been dumb with what she had seen. She still was.

  The pearls clumped untidily around her neck. Her dress was filthy. She had nothing else to wear. There was no one to help dress her. It was better not to think what had happened to Dapea.

  Dapea, and Hestie, and her mother, and all of them – all of them! She was going to wake every morning and find that they were gone. She had even been fighting with them, betraying them, on the day they had died! And she might have prevented it. Luke – Ambrose – had been trying to warn her.

  Why hadn't she listened?

  What had made her hate a thirteen-year-old boy so much that she would not hear him?

  Grief, when she could not cry, was like sickness when she could not be sick. There was no relief from the ugliness inside herself.

  She sat alone for a long time as the river drifted slowly under the sun.

  A little way along the bank was a small clump of snowfishers, the brave plant that forces its way out through the wintry earth and drags the riverbanks into spring. She could see the white heads and silver-green leaves nodding in the light. For a while she watched them glowing while the river ran by.

  At last, she picked one of them – just one. She was sorry to destroy anything; but she wanted to show Chawlin that the earth bore flowers, even now.

  He was sitting where she had left him. He had the cup upon his knees. There was water in it, and he peered into the water as if to see something that moved there. He did not look up as she approached. So she dropped the flower into the bowl under his nose, and knelt beside him to kiss him on the ear. He was startled. Then he laughed.

  His fingers picked the flower slowly out from the cup.

  ‘I remember these. They grew in great masses along the streams by my keep at Hayley. I could spend a halfday among them, lying there with my fishing rod when the company of men grew dull …’

  He looked up.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, gently.

  ‘Better,’ she said. ‘At least for a while. I want to tell you that you are wonderful. And wonderful things happen, as well as terrible things. And when we die, all that happens is that they stop happening.’

  ‘I suppose you are right.’

  ‘I'm very muddy,’ she said determinedly. ‘Have you anything I could change into?’

  ‘Not a rag. But I have some coin. There may be a chance for me to buy something further downriver. When we have you dressed more plainly, it will be easier for us to go among other people without calling attention to ourselves.’ His eye fell on her pearls. ‘You should hide those at once. Next to your skin, if you can.’

  The water had gone from the cup. Her flower lay curled and sodden in the bottom of it. She must have interrupted what he was doing, but he had not reproached her.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Downriver. Our punt will take us all the way to the lake. If you climb in now, I'll pass our things to you. We can breakfast later in the morning.’

  The punt, now that she saw it in daylight, was a plain, narrow boat not much longer than the height of a man. Chawlin had moored it by pushing its nose into the reeds and jamming the punt-pole into the mud on its river-side. Most of the space in it was already full of bundles. She stepped unsteadily in and found a place to sit down. Chawlin passed her two rolled blankets and a water bottle. He carried the cup onto the punt himself, and set it at his feet. Then he drew the pole from the mud, placed the end against the bank and bent upon it. The boat moved slowly out into the stream.

  ‘Now Michael guard us,’ he said, in the ancient prayer of the traveller who sets out at the beginning of a new day.

  ‘… and Raphael guide our way,’ answered Sophia without thinking.

  Chawlin swayed with his stroke, and found his balance again. As they moved into midstream the current picked them and drew them on. Sophia looked back up the river. There, beyond Chawlin's shoulder, the blue sky was smudged with a stain. It was too far to see where it came from, or to smell what it bore downwind; but she knew that it must be the smoke rising above the walls of Develin, where she had lived all her sixteen years.

  Neither of them had spoken the last words of the prayer: For we are far from home.

  Ambrose could climb no further. The slope of brown rock had grown steeper and steeper until he had been scrambling on his hands and knees. Now it ended in a wall that rose far above his head. On either hand it curled away until it was lost in dimness. Up, and to his right, the two great lights burned in what looked like a mountain-peak at the top of the wall. They did not seem to be far away. They wavered and grew with a noise like huge fires.

  Beside him the woman stood.

  ‘Put your hand on the wall,’ she said.

  It was his mother's voice, distorted in that strange air.

  ‘Is it stone that you feel?’

  He did as he was told. After so long among the brown rocks – he did not know how long it had been – he was moving as if in a heavy fever. Something about the air was fogging his mind. He could feel the wall beneath his hand. If it was not stone, he did not know what it might be. His eye, however, could pick out a pattern of lines and curves – huge curves – upon it. The pattern repeated itself. The lines were not smooth on the face of the rock, but marked with ridges, as though each was the rim of a lizard-scale the size of a castle-gate, overlapping another, and another, on and on upon an enormous, serpentine body that lay along the top of the slope.

  ‘Now look up,’ said the woman. ‘Look at the light. Do you see?’

  Ambrose looked at the fires on the mountain-peak.

  The rocks were formed strangely there. The wall broke into massive curves and outcrops, the size of small hills. One great fire wavered and grew with a roaring like snows tumbling on mountainsides. Beyond it the second light was less glaring, but it trembled in time with the first, until he was sure that it had no light of its own but was simply a reflection.

  What could reflect such a fire as that – standing upright on a mountainside like a huge eye?

  An eye.

  It was an eye in a head the size of a mountain, throwing back the light that burned for ever in its jaws. And under his hand was a body of scales, the height of a cliff, that seemed to curve all the way out of sight as if it would embrace the world.

  ‘You have touched the hide of Capuu,’ said the woman. ‘No creature from the pit will approach him. This is why we have come as far as we have. You can rest now.’

  His knees crumpled, and he lay on the ground at the foot of the wall.

  Before him the slope dropped steeply. The huge space below him roiled with mists. The land at the bottom of the slope, across which he had marched and marched ever since Develin, was shrouded in it. But now he could see, across the face of the mist, across distances impossible to guess at, a line at the far horizon. It might have been a wall as high as the one against which his back was set. Slowly, as he looked, he saw that it must be the same wall. The curve of the vast beast behind him continued and continued to left and right, until at last it swept around to embrace the clouded lowland in one huge ring like the rim of a bowl.

  ‘We are looking across the Cup of the World,’ said the woman. ‘It is clear to see, from up here. It is also clearer to the ear. Listen.’

  The fire above the wall roared on and on. But she was not talking about that. She was looking down into the lowlands out of which they had climbed. He waited, but heard
nothing – except the deep humming that was constant in this place. Down there, as he had stumbled across the floor of the bowl, it had been all around him, barely audible, pulsing upon his skin through all his long journey. Now he was above it, and out of it. And because he was out of it he heard it more fully. It was fathomless; but it had a shape that he knew.

  ‘Someone is crying,’ he said through a dry throat.

  ‘Have you heard it before?’

  ‘No.’

  Except …

  ‘It was there, every day we were in the mountains. We heard it in dreams, and also in the music that the hillmen have spun from the dreams that come to them. We lived in her shadow for twelve years, and within a half-hour's climb of the pool where her first tears fell. It is Beyah, the Mother of the World, weeping for the child that she lost. She sits and dreams this place around us. Once it was her garden. Now these rocks are all she sees of the world.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘The tears of one like that – what do you think they hold? Can you imagine the grief of a mother who has lost her child, swollen to the size of one that might be a god? Down there in the pit is her rage and her despair. Do you know what it is she cries as she weeps?’

  ‘It's wordless.’

  ‘It is not wordless. If you dived deep into the pool you would hear it. As you swam among her tears you would hear her cry, “Let them eat their sons!”

  ‘And there was a man who embraced that cry as he sank to the deep. He has drunk from it for three hundred years, undying, and carries it into the world. Tell me his name.’

  Ambrose shook his head.

  ‘I don't know,’ he said.

  ‘I have told it to you myself. Tell me his name.’

  ‘You mean the Heron Man.’

  ‘That is not his name.’

  ‘The Prince – the Prince Under the Sky.’

  ‘His name!’

  ‘I don't know! I don't know!’

  She knelt before him, on the narrow lip of rock above the slope. She looked into his eyes with his mother's face. She took him by the shoulders with his mother's hands, and pulled gently, as though to bring him up to his knees.