by Joan Aiken
The queen greeted Bran in a rallying tone as he bowed slightly.
"Well, my soothsayer? Why have you been absent from our presence for so long? Where did you go, and what have you been doing?"
"Oh," he answered rather vaguely, "I have been wandering here and there about Your Grace's dominions, to and fro, up and down. Today I was in the silver mines; I brought this for you," and from a pouch slung at his girdle he produced a great chunk of rough sapphire, as large as a brick. Even Lady Ettarde let out a squeak of admiration.
"You could make yourself an hourglass from it, or some such thing," Bran said carelessly.
The lump was so heavy that the queen could only just hold it in her weak, puffy hands. After turning it about to catch the blue gleams of light, she let it roll to the ground. "Why should I want an hourglass?" she demanded pettishly. "The hours go slowly enough as it is. Tell me a story, Bran, to while away the time."
"I should have thought your time passed pleasantly enough," observed Bran. "You have company."
His eyes rested on Dido, but she was surprised to see that he gave no hint of recognition. On the point of greeting him, she changed her mind.
"Company? Oh yes," said the queen coolly. "But your stories are better than all. Because one day you will tell me that the king has returned, and it will be true."
"Meanwhile I will tell you a story that I heard in the silver mines."
The queen settled herself comfortably to listen. Lady Ettarde, like a monkey, hopped up on to the couch, and began carefully brushing Ginevra's hair with a silver brush.
"There was once a poet who worked in the silver mines," said Bran. "He kept a cockatoo, which he daily left in his house while he was working in the pit." Bran stroked the white bird that sat so still on his shoulder.
"But one night the poet dreamed that the bird had picked up his heart—which he took out every night before he went to sleep, and hung on a stand by his bed—the bird had taken his heart in its claws, and flown up the chimney, carrying his heart with it. Next morning, when the poet woke up, sure enough, the bird was up the chimney, and he had to go to work in the mine leaving it there. He told his dream to the companion who worked in the same gallery with him. But that afternoon the gallery roof caved in, and the poet was killed. His mate escaped. But now, the miners say, nobody will live in the poet's empty cottage, because his dream is still up the chimney."
"His dream, or the bird with his heart?" asked the queen.
"His dream, his bird, his heart; they are all the same."
"What does the story mean, soothsayer?"
"It is a true story; so you may choose your own meaning for it, ma'am. Now, are you going to give that child her permit to climb Mount Damyake and go to Lyonesse?" Bran asked without any change of tone. Dido was very much startled.
"Oh—do you really think I should? Very well—very well; in a minute or two; there's no hurry," said the queen petulantly, jerking her head, so that Lady Ettarde gave a smothered exclamation and nearly dropped the hairbrush.
"Bran—dear Bran," the queen went on, "can't you give me any news? Any hope? No matter how faint? How far distant?"
"All I can tell you, lady, is that it will be this year. When I know more—more shall be told you. If there weren't such a lot of cobwebs and shrunken heads in this palace," Bran said—his tone was not critical, merely matter-of-fact—"I might be able to see further."
The queen appeared to ignore this remark. After a moment or two she said, "Well ... another story, then!"
Bran sighed a little, as if he found the request tiresome, but he thought for a minute and then said rapidly, "A man called Ianto was walking across the town to his place of work when, looking down, he saw a gold and diamond necklace lying on the cobbles. That cannot be real gold, he thought. It must be worthless, or someone else would have picked it up already. And so he left it lying and went on. But when he was halfway across the town, waiting to cross a busy street, he looked down and saw the same necklace, or one just like it, lying in the roadway. The civil guard are laying police traps for me, he thought. If I pick it up, one of them is sure to jump out of a doorway and accuse me of intending to steal it. So he left the necklace lying where it was, and crossed the street. But when he came to his place of work, there, in front of the entrance, he saw what appeared to be the selfsame necklace, lying in the dust. Well, thought Ianto, now I know it must be meant for me. It is my destiny to have this necklace. So he picked it up. And it turned into a snake and bit him."
"Well, really!" exclaimed the queen indignantly. "What kind of a story is that! What are we to make of such a tale? Did the man die?"
"He was a doctor," Bran said, "and his place of work was a hospital, so he was able to treat himself with snake antidote. He was ill, but he did not die. And from his adventure he learned that if life has a necklace for you, or a snake, you may as well take it the first time, for it is sure to come back sooner or later."
So saying, Bran presented the queen with a gold and diamond necklace which he drew from his pouch. She accepted it, half laughing, half nervous.
"Will it turn into a snake and bite me?"
"No, ma'am. It is only dust—yellow dust and sparkling dust. A snake would be worth much more."
"Why?" demanded the queen, as Lady Ettarde clasped the chain round her throat.
"A snake is alive. Each live creature is unique. Take its life, and something is gone forever. But stones have no life, no identity. You cannot kill a stone."
An odd silence followed Bran's words. After quite a long pause the queen said irritably, "But if he had picked up the necklace the first time, his life might not have been saved.... What was it that you wanted me to do? Oh, I recall—a permit for the girl. Where are my tablets? Asclabor!"
A chamberlain came forward, bowed, and offered her writing materials. She scribbled on a scrap of parchment; the attendant dropped hot wax on it; then the queen pressed her signet ring on the wax.
"There you are, child! I am sure I do not know what all this fuss is about. Run along—be off—make yourself scarce. Gracious knows why you have been bothering me for so long."
Dido took the signed and sealed parchment. She would have liked to make some retort, but prudence withheld her. She curtsyed and turned to go, noticing that Lady Ettarde's assistants, halfway along the hall, were moving unobtrusively toward the entrance.
"I will escort the child to her companions," said Bran.
"No! Stay and tell me more tales!" said the queen.
"In a moment, Highness; I will tell you the story of the sailor who dropped his anchor down a well. In one moment I will return."
With two rapid limping steps Bran overtook Dido, and walked beside her down the length of the hall and round the curving gallery. Dido noticed that all the officials they met bowed to Bran very respectfully. None of them approached him.
"I liked that story about the bird, mister," said Dido. "Did it happen to you?"
"Why should you think so?"
He began levering himself down the stairs by the marble handrail.
"Because—I dunno! I just thought it might! Hey, there's Lieutenant Windward and Mr. Mully. I thought they mighta got tired o' waiting and gone home." Dido flourished the ribboned permit joyfully at her companions and called, "I got it, all right and tight!"
"Took long enough!" remarked the lieutenant. "Did she—?" He was evidently about to say, "Did she give much trouble?" but checked himself, seeing Dido's escort.
"This here's Mr. Bran, the queen's soothsayer," said Dido.
"I say, sir, do you think there's any chance that Her Majesty will change her mind and let Cap'n Hughes out of jail?" Lieutenant Windward asked. But the soothsayer shook his head.
"She will not let him out. But he will not be in prison for very long." Then he glanced at the revolving door, which was stationary. Apparently it began to move only when it was in the correct position for people to use it. "You have another five minutes to wait," Bran said.
"When do the big doors open?" asked Dido. "The ones that the whirling door's set into?"
"Not until the return of the king. On that day, and that day only, they will be opened."
"I say, sir, isn't that a load of moonshine?" suggested Lieutenant Windward diffidently. "I mean, about the king's return?"
"Moonshine? No indeed. All the omens predict that his return is close at hand."
Mr. Multiple, overjoyed to find someone both knowledgeable and prepared to answer questions, burst out with one that had been bothering him. "I beg your pardon, sir, but—those heads! The ones on the waiting room wall, you know—are they real?"
"Certainly they are real." Bran turned to glance through the waiting room door at the rows of shiny, shrunken objects. "There are tribes in the forest of Broceliande who make them. It is an ancient skill. They extract the skull, insert a hot stone, then sew up the lips and the slit through which the skull was removed. The head is then hung upside down for a year, to appease the owner's spirit."
"Wouldn't appease me," said Dido.
"Foreign travelers buy many of them; they are one of Cumbria's principal exports."
"I call that a bit much," grunted Lieutenant Windward. "I mean—for the queen to have them in her palace..."
"She wishes to encourage native crafts," said Bran. His face was quite devoid of expression. "Now the door will start to revolve," he added. "You can tell, because it begins to make that humming sound." In a lower tone, covered by the hum of the door, he went on, "Make all possible haste to leave Bath. And take your sick companion with you. Bath is excessively dangerous for any person suffering from a disorder of the consciousness. Or for children."
"How did you know about Mr. Holy?" Dido asked.
But he had already turned and was beginning to ascend the great staircase.
The revolving door began to spin, and they hurried through it.
"I wish he could come with us," said Dido, when they were outside.
"Him? Climb mountains with a wooden leg? Are you dicked in the nob?" said Mr. Multiple.
"I say, don't the mountains look queersome, though," said Dido. For the ring of great peaks, some of them spouting lurid smoke threaded with sparks, now stood silhouetted against the pale sunset sky, like a stony crown encircling the twilit town.
"We will start at dawn tomorrow," decided Lieutenant Windward. "I'll ask the hotel to provide us with a guide, and provisions for the journey. Now we had best go back and study the map."
8
The hotel provided them with a dozen burros, for riders and baggage, and so they proceeded at donkey pace. Two of the burros had a litter slung between them, into which the unconscious Mr. Holystone was fastened. The procession was led by a guide, Marcus Dylan, who, with provisions for the journey, had also been supplied by the hotel.
"What did you do about paying?" Dido asked Lieutenant Windward, edging her burro alongside his. Captain Hughes had had much of the expedition's supply of ready cash about his person when he was imprisoned, and so they were short of funds.
"Oh, the management at the Sydney would give us anything when they saw the queen's permit! I told them that we would return in six or seven days, and that the captain would pay the whole shot at the end of our visit. I do not propose to fork out any of my own bezants while he is a prisoner. We may need what little money we have on our way to Lyonesse."
"I dunno what we'd spend it on," said Dido. "I don't see too many hot-pie sellers or cockle stands round here."
They were crossing the stony upland plain which surrounded Bath Regis. Much of the ground was rocky and uncultivated, studded, here and there, by sigse thorn and a species of cactus resembling a giant spiny hand. Not another human being was in sight.
"It sure is a drearsome part." Dido shivered. Yet, despite the cold, her spirits had lifted on leaving the town of Bath. So had those of her companions. Even the waxen face of Mr. Holystone had taken on a faint tinge of color. Having left it, they realized for the first time to the full what a terribly oppressive atmosphere permeated Queen Ginevra's capital.
"We have several hundred miles to go before reaching Lyonesse," pointed out the lieutenant. "There must be towns or villages along the way."
"Hope so," grunted Multiple. "Or it's going to be sharp sleeping at night."
The predawn air was razor-cold. As they left the plain and began to crawl at what seemed snail's pace up the vast slopes of Mount Damyake, the increasing altitude rendered breathing harder and harder. Lieutenant Windward had, however, prudently seen that the party was equipped with a large bundle of the rumirumi lilies, wrapped in damp moss, for the use of the travelers when distressed by lack of oxygen. The donkeys, fortunately, seemed unaffected by the thinness of the air. Dido was very glad of her mount; she was not certain that she would have been able to walk far on her own. Moreover, it was comfortably warm, like riding on a barrel of hot tar covered by a hearth rug.
Presently, however, the sun shot up, and at once began to send down rays of such torrid heat that they made haste to don the straw hats with which Windward, on the advice of the guide, had also provided them.
"Awkward sort o' climate," remarked Dido. "Freezing one minute, roasting the next. Hey, Noah—don't you want to lay a hat over poor Mr. Holy's face? No sense in getting him sunstrook on top of all else."
During the days of Mr. Holystone's illness no one had shaved him, and his beard, of a brownish-gold color, had grown several inches; so had his hair, which previously he had worn very short. He's a right good-looking fellow with a beard, Dido thought, as Noah carefully balanced a sombrero over the invalid's face.
As the sun climbed higher, it illuminated the gigantic symmetrical cones, the fantastic snow-covered peaks, and pinnacles like spectral cities of ice, that surrounded them on every side. Bath Regis was now a mere dot in the distance.
When they reached the top of a lofty ridge Dido, looking back, let out a cry of wonder.
"What's to do?" inquired Mr. Multiple, kicking his burro till it came level with hers.
"Look at all that flat land we been riding across, Mr. Mully. See them lines on the rock?"
"I could hardly miss them," he said. "I reckon they are geological strata. They are far too huge for people to have had anything to do with them. Why, some of them must be more than fifty miles long!"
From side to side of the upland plain long lines were to be seen, as if some god or giant had leaned down from the heavens and with an idle fingernail scraped a series of huge drawings over the countryside. More and more of the pattern became visible as the party mounted higher.
And when they halted for the noon meal, Dido said, "Well, I wasn't certain before, but now I am! Look, Mr. Windward—ain't those marks down there the exact same as Mr. Holystone's birthmark?"
"Holystone's birthmark? Can't say as I even knew he had one," Mr. Windward said rather skeptically. Dido, however, rolled back the blanket to show the sick man's forearm, and Mr. Windward was obliged to agree that there was a remarkable likeness.
"I often noticed that mark when he was a-peeling spuds," said Dido.
"It must be nothing more than a coincidence," observed Windward. "For why should a man have a mark on his arm that's the same as one nobody can see unless they're on top of a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain?"
"I dunno," said Dido. "But I reckon it's lucky for us as we brought Mr. Holy along. Looks like he belongs to these parts all right."
Lieutenant Windward absently pulled his chronometer from his pocket to check it against the position of the sun in the sky, and uttered an exclamation.
"What's up?" said Multiple.
"It's started going again!" He set it to the correct time.
"So's mine," said Multiple, pulling out his turnip watch. "Well, if that don't beat cockfighting!"
They soon started off again. Dylan, the guide—a wizened, talkative little man—was emphatic that they must reach the valley of Lake Arianrod before dusk, and not risk being overtaken by night on the
bare mountainside, or they would freeze to death, not to mention having their blood drained by vampires or being pecked to pieces by giant owls.
"Aurocs bad along here, etiam atque etiam; yet remains a long way to go, sirs," he kept saying anxiously.
Dido felt she would be quite pleased to see an auroc; she had heard them mentioned so frequently, without ever actually encountering one, that she had begun to doubt their existence and wonder if they were not bearing the blame for somebody else's activities.
"Which is Mount Arrabe?" she asked Dylan.
He pointed ahead and to the left.
"We now go round, circumvenimus, back of Mount Damyake. Lacus sacratissimus—Arianrodwater—is lying between Damyake, Arrabe, Calabe, and Catelonde mountains; Arrabe not first mountain you see, but second; having two big teeth like cayman. Very bad mountain, Arrabe!"
"Why bad?" Dido wanted to know, studying Arrabe's towering twin peaks.
Dylan made the double-circle sign. "Belong to King Arawn, king of the Black World! Aurocs roost on top, pecking at stars. Old Caradog the guardian live there in the temple of Sul, in Sul's town. I not taking you past Arrabe. Ladies of night come there, too."
"Who," inquired Dido, "are the ladies of night?"
Dylan traced the two circles again, and squinted through them at Dido.
"Owl ladies. Better not speaking names." He made a gesture as of snipping with shears. "Queen owl ladies who make dress."
"Do you mean," said Dido, greatly puzzled, "the queen's mistress of the robes? And her people? Lady Ettar—"
"Hssssh!" Dylan nodded nervously, glancing around as if on the lookout for eavesdroppers, then urged his donkey faster, to get away from Dido, who rode on very thoughtfully.
If this Elen, she thought, is a prisoner on Arrabe, I reckon I know who put her there. And I reckon I can guess why. But no use talking about it to Windward or Mr. Mully! They'd think I'd got windmills in my head. I'll jist have to keep a sharp eye out myself. Best do that anyhows, if there's really aurocs about.