Ambergate

by Patricia Elliott

  A clatter made me jump. Behind us, Pegg had opened a drawer in the desk and was examining a small pistol in his hand. “The Master’s gun’s still here. Still loaded too.”

  The men were nearly at the tower, as if they knew we sheltered there. “Are those rifles they’re carrying, Mr. Jukes?” I said, my voice high and strange.

  Jukes nodded briefly. “Look at that, Pegg.”

  Dark shapes slunk low around the soldiers. “They’ve brought dogs!” I whispered.

  “They’ve followed our scent. Be sniffing us out next,” muttered Pegg, moving to Jukes’s side, the pistol still in his hand.

  “But they’re not in uniform,” I said hesitantly. “Can they be soldiers, Mr. Pegg?”

  “What else? Night maneuvers. Don’t want to be seen, do they?”

  “There be a whole lot of them,” said Jukes, his voice shaking. He added dourly, “The law will have its way in this country, sure enough. What she did”—he jerked his head toward me—“must have been wicked indeed that so many of them be eager to get her, Pegg.”

  “I never meant this to happen,” I said. “Please go—look to yourselves.”

  “Too late,” growled Pegg. “If we leave now, we’ll be savaged by the dogs or shot by them soldiers most like. Accomplices, they’ll call us. We’re harboring a criminal.”

  “We’ll be taken to the Capital, up before the Lord Protector himself,” Jukes said, his lanky frame quivering.

  “And all for a kitchen maid,” said Pegg.

  Below us they began to hammer on the outside door. My heart almost stopped.

  The two men stared at each other. Pegg looked down at the pistol in his hand. “I’ve a little notion that might work, Jukes.”

  Jukes eyed the pistol apprehensively. “You’ll be in worse trouble if you use that on them.”

  Pegg shook his head; his teeth bared in a ghastly smile. “They want the girl, right? Well then, we shall give her to them nice and easy and not be seen ourselves.”

  And his right hand swung to point the pistol direct at me.

  9

  The group of men who surrounded the tower began to thump their sticks on the ground in triumph. Earlier the dogs had sniffed a bodice taken from the missing girl’s bedchamber, and minutes ago they had picked up the same scent in the grounds by the wall. Now they were going mad around the tower, panting and straining on their leashes: tough, rough-haired mongrels with sharp noses and even sharper teeth. She must be in there, the girl they were after.

  Not long until the door was down. Even solid oak couldn’t bear up against pickaxes.

  In the dark and from a distance, it is easy to mistake a stick for a rifle. But soldiers do not carry sticks, and these men were not soldiers. They were rebels.

  The leader of the group of rebels, a young man called Titus Molde, bent to feel for the dagger he always kept in his boot, and smiled to himself. He wasn’t expecting any trouble, but it might be handy. He had spotted the two men with her and didn’t know if they’d let her go easily. Number 102. At last they had found her. It would make all the difference to the morale of the cause, so badly damaged by the death of Robert Fane.

  And he’d be glad to be out of this place. It made Titus Molde uneasy: the trees like ghosts in the moonlight, the whining of the wind. He was used to working in the night, of course, but he didn’t like it. He wasn’t devout anymore, but at times he regretted he’d ever cast away his amulet.

  Something flickered against the full moon. A large bird, neck outstretched. His hand went up automatically to his throat, to the place where his amulet had been. What could it be? What Night Bird had that wingspan—or was it a trick of the moonlight? And now another bird was following it, and another: a whole flock of great, white, long-necked birds, swooping low over the dark blowing trees of the copse and flying through the wind toward the men.

  Then Titus Molde smiled again, at his own stupidity, as he realized what they were.

  But the men in charge of breaking down the door looked up at the white birds flying against the stars, muttered together, and put down their axes uneasily. Those holding torches shifted closer together, the ring of men around the tower beginning to break up. The dogs, sensing the tension, were barking, hackles up, and from far away in the Hall there came an answering howl from the imprisoned guard dogs of Murkmere.

  “What are they?” said one of the men, looking up at the great heavy birds and rubbing moon-dazzled eyes.

  “An omen,” said another.

  The youth standing next to him gave a frightened moan. “What do they mean in the Table of Significance?”

  It was time to stop this, thought Titus Molde. He strode over. “They’re swans, can’t you see that? Wild swans. They breed in the Wasteland.” These recruits from the city!

  Unfortunately, the local men were down at the gates. The birds made no sound, no cry, as they circled beneath the moon. The wind buffeted the men’s ears and hissed through the undergrowth around them.

  Then there was a crash from far above their heads, from the top of the tower. Something fell through the air. Nerves on edge, the nearest men leapt back. One of them held the object up, turning it gingerly this way and that in the moonlight. “Broken glass,” he said. “She’s trying to break the window!”

  “We’ll be waiting for her if she jumps!” said another man.

  “Be sure to catch her, then,” said Titus Molde. “I want to take her back to the Capital in one piece.”

  Another crash from above, and another, and then something invisible came hurtling through the air, followed by a lethal rain of smaller pieces. The men dodged back, but one brought his hand to his face with a cry of anguish and took it away, black with blood.

  “We could try shouting up to her,” someone said to Titus Molde.

  “She’d never hear, not with this wind,” Molde said. He hesitated, then yelled over to the men at the door, “Hurry up with that, can’t you?”

  More shards of glass fell, the smaller ones blown in all directions by the wind. The men on the grass drew back hastily; those at the door of the tower pressed themselves against the wood for protection. They waited speechlessly to see what would happen next, mesmerized by the dark hole that had been the great window at the top.

  Then they gave a low groan of amazement and fear. Something extraordinary was appearing out of the darkness up there, something inhuman—like a giant moth, with an eerie glow to the vast, furled wings. And even as they thought it a moth, the pale wings uncurled and they saw it was a bird.

  It had not yet flown out. It perched, swaying, on the very edge of the hole.

  And in its claws it held a girl.

  Too frightened to care about losing their quarry, the men clutched at their amulets, letting the dogs loose.

  Only Titus Molde knew what he was seeing. He’d heard about the flying machine that had been fashioned long ago by the late Master of Murkmere. It had never flown, so far as he knew. Was the girl so desperate she was trying to escape them in such a risky contraption? Something so fragile, so amateurishly built, could only crash. She’d fall through the wind to her death on the hard earth.

  This went through his mind in a flash. A voice inside his head screamed protest, then he was running toward the tower, shouting upward into the mocking wind, “Stop!”

  Even before the word was torn from his mouth, the birdmachine had moved suddenly forward, had lurched over the edge.

  The men below stood, transfixed. They held their breath. Alone among them their leader moved, gesticulating wildly, screaming something inaudible above the barking dogs.

  The bird thing did not fall immediately. As if there was some impetus pushing it from behind, it went horizontally through the air for a short way, holding its height, the wind beneath its wings. Then it slowed. It seemed to judder in the air, hanging stationary but quivering, for a second.

  Titus Molde shut his eyes. He felt air press on his forehead as something flew heavily over his head. He ducked invo
luntarily; the men behind him cried out.

  When he looked around, black wings had blotted out the moon. The wind was full of birds. The swans were all about the men in a turbulence, beating the air so that the screams of the men were muffled by the thump, thump of wings. The men cowered down, shielding their eyes.

  Titus Molde fell flat on the grass, protecting his face with his hands. His heart was banging in his chest: he knew that swans could kill a man. He heard the swans attack the contraption, beat it to the ground.

  He lay motionless until he thought the vile birds had gone. He was full of fury and humiliation. He was the leader and he’d done nothing to prevent the girl’s death. He’d been too scared, without an amulet. Scared of birds that had no sinister significance in the Table, were no doom-laden omen.

  The wind rattled the bare branches in the copse and lifted his hair. The dogs had fallen silent. His men would not get up from the ground until he did. He’d best stand up and go over to the debris left by the shattered machine, the dead body in the midst of it all.

  But when he raised his head and looked up, there was nothing to see. Beneath the empty stars his men lay huddled on the ground: pathetic bundles of rags and spent swagger, sticks at all angles, useless. A couple of dogs nosed at them and whimpered.

  The swans must have flown away into the night. But neither, on the stretch of moonlit scrub before him, was there any sign of the flying machine.

  The Wasteland

  10

  Someone was lifting my head. I didn’t want them to do that; it hurt too much.

  I drew my brows together with the faintest flicker. I was too hot. I heard murmuring. Then I slept.

  Later there was the rim of something hard against my lips. I opened my mouth. A bitter liquid. The air smelled of something faintly familiar.

  I groaned. Again, the murmur came, then the soothing touch of cool fingers on my forehead. I recognized the scent in the air now, but I was too tired to make sense of it. Hay, new-mown. And something that stank of animal covering me.

  Another time when the touch came, I opened my eyes. Eyes looked down into mine. I shut my eyes again, and slept.

  Later, I was given water.

  One day I said, “Who are you?”

  My lips were cracked; it was painful to move them. My voice sounded old and rusty. But when I looked over from the straw pallet on which I lay, I could see a man sitting on a stool by the fire, and I knew him. He had watched over me during the days and nights that had passed, had laid healing hands on my head, covered me with sheepskins. Sometimes I had watched him move about this dark, smoky place as he tended me. There had been someone else too—a young man—but he was not here now.

  The older man had been gazing into the fire, but when I spoke, he looked around, startled. Then he rose stiffly to his feet. He was a giant, broad and strong. As I shrank back, pressing myself down into the bedding, he went across to an opening in the wall, and in a voice to match his size shouted out into the beam of white daylight, “Erland!”

  Then he came over and spoke softly to me, pulling up a stool and sitting on it with a grunt a little way away, as if he sensed I might be frightened if he came too close—though I knew he had looked after me most gently.

  “My name is Gadd, Miss,” he said. “You’ve been very poorly. I think you hit your head.” He spoke with the round vowels of the Eastern Edge. “I gave you feverfew to cool you.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I bit my lip at the thought of the intimate tasks he must have done for me, but his face showed only respect and concern.

  “My son will be here shortly,” he said. “He’ll be pleased you’ve woken proper.”

  I nodded, and raised my hand weakly to feel my head. I couldn’t feel any bump, but my hair was filthy, matted with dirt.

  “Your hands were in a state,” said Gadd. “I couldn’t get the blood from beneath your fingernails without distressing you.”

  My hands—my wrists and forearms! Surely he must have seen the number branded on my skin? His face showed nothing.

  “I can wash myself now,” I said, anxious.

  “Slowly does it. You must rest as much as possible. My son found you, Erland. He carried you here.” He spoke of him with shy pride.

  “Where am I?”

  “Why, in the Wasteland.”

  I started. “The Wasteland?” I was sure I must still be on the Murkmere estate.

  I looked wildly about me, at the odd, circular walls of plaited reeds. I was lying in a dwelling made entirely from grass: even the floor covering was woven from rushes. There was no roof; the walls curved up to a central hole that let out smoke from the fire.

  “I didn’t know anyone lived in the Wasteland,” I said.

  “There was a village here on the river road once,” said Gadd. “I still make use of its well and grazing ground. No man could live here otherways.”

  “So the river road is close by?” I whispered.

  “You’re lying right on it, Miss, though you’d scarce call it a road these days. But if you’ve the eyes to see it, it be there.”

  Gadd’s eyes were narrow slits of light, permanently half-closed, as if against the sun, and surrounded by waves of brown wrinkles. They were so disconcertingly direct I thought he must know my destination. “Erland found your wings.”

  “I was escaping…” A wave of terror caught me. “Soldiers…”

  He clucked his teeth. “Easy, lass. There be no soldiers here.”

  I relaxed back into the sheepskin coverings and fell silent, breathing in the fragrant green scent of the place, a mingling of the burning rush lights above me, the sheaves of cut grasses, and the young sappy wood on the fire. In the shadows I saw the glint of scythes propped against a wall, the dull sheen of cooking utensils hanging from hooks in the roof. There was little furniture, save for a roughhewn table, a stool and a ribbed wooden chair.

  As I listened to the fire sparking, I must have closed my eyes, for when I opened them Gadd had gone and there was a youth crouched on the matting not far from me. He was staring at me, but as soon as he saw me look over he bent his head. His straight fair hair fell forward into his eyes.

  I said painfully, “Thank you—for bringing me here.”

  He looked at me again. Under the fall of fair hair his eyes were deep-set and grave above a jutting nose, but now a smile lit his face. He was lanky and long-limbed in his rough breeches and patched jacket; he’d not yet filled out to his full strength like his father, but he was tall and broad-shouldered, and moved with a quick litheness unlike his father’s stiff gait.

  “What is your name?” he asked. His accent was not as strong as his father’s.

  “I have no given name,” I said in a low voice. “I’ve been called Scuff—for part of my life.”

  He considered the name solemnly, then shook his head. “You must find your true name.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  He shrugged. “Time passes differently in the Wasteland.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your wings are still out there, in a reed bed that cushioned your fall.” He jerked his head toward the opening in the wall. “You weren’t moving, so I lifted you up and brought you here.”

  “Your father nursed me,” I whispered.

  “He’s a healer.”

  I thought of Gadd’s cool touch on my forehead, all he’d done for me. “I wish I’d the means to pay him.”

  “Money would mean nothing to him,” said Erland gruffly. “He cared for you because you were hurt.”

  I didn’t know what to say, faced with such unquestioning kindness. Tears filled my eyes. Though I couldn’t say such a thing to this grave, unworldly youth and his gentle father, who together had saved my life, I wished I had died when I fell from the air. There was nothing to live for.

  I had no way of telling how much time was passing, nor did it matter to me.

  I lay listlessly on the pallet, listening to the fire crackle or to Gadd
and Erland talking to each other as they moved about, preparing food, bringing in clanking buckets of well water or cow’s milk, sharpening blades. Their thoughtfulness was endless. They rigged up a reed screen to preserve my modesty, and brought me bowls of water to wash myself in.

  When it grew dark outside, they pulled my pallet closer to the fire and I would watch Gadd plaiting reeds into baskets and mats to sell, for although the rheum had stiffened his legs, his fingers were nimble and clever. I would scarce touch the fish they cooked for supper, and it seemed too great an effort to talk. But I’d notice how easy they were together in conversation, how they’d joke and tease each other in their soft voices. As Erland passed Gadd’s stool, he’d ruffle his father’s graying locks in mocking impudence; in return, Gadd would pretend to box Erland’s ears or clap him on the rump to chase him to his duties.

  And in their eyes there was such affection that deep inside me something woke and twisted with emotion.

  During the day I was often on my own, for Erland went out whatever the weather, and Gadd only stayed behind if the rheum was bothering him badly, for he needed to tend the animals. But I did not have the desire or strength to go out with them. I scarce had the energy to do more than empty the bowl they’d given me for a chamber pot: the few dragging steps to the latrine ditch they’d dug in a clump of silver birch. Not far away I could hear the lowing of a cow, a goat bleating, but my eyes didn’t leave the ground. It was too dangerous.

  I’d often finger the amber stone that Aggie had given me, dangling it like a solid drop of sunlight on its leather thread, touching the smoothness that had saved me from the sky.

  Or had it?

  Sometimes at night I would dream. The dreams would be a blur of images: Pegg’s hand on the pistol; the upturned faces of the soldiers; the brands burning below in the darkness; the dogs howling and straining on their leashes. I’d feel Pegg’s pistol in my ribs, the leather flying harness cutting into my body.