When the King did not answer, she went on, ‘In her dreams, when she was a child. Did you think I did not know? We prise each prince from Beyah’s grip, one after another. And you use them to repeat your father’s sins! Including his sin against me! What do you think I feel?’
‘I don’t care what you feel,’ Ambrose screamed. ‘Leave Atti alone! Leave me alone! Go back to your damned pool, and next time come when I send for you!’
‘Very well,’ she said coldly, and left him there.
XXI
In His Cell
o, I will not undress,’ said the Queen to her ladies that evening. ‘You may all go. Melissa will stay and put me to bed in due time.’
The ladies shot dubious glances at one another.
‘Your Majesty—’
‘I said that you may go.’
They left, one after another through the door. ‘Bring me a shawl, Melissa,’ said the Queen. ‘And make ready a lamp. We are going out again.’
Moving stiffly, Melissa searched for a square of warm cloth and arranged it around Atti’s shoulders. Then she went to the Queen’s reading desk. The lamp there was full. One of the other maids must have seen to it earlier. Melissa was grateful that she was not going to have to do any more rummaging in cupboards than was necessary.
Atti watched as she returned. Melissa came slowly, trying to make her step look as easy as possible, but she could not do it.
‘Did they punish you, Melissa?’ said the Queen.
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘For coming into the hall today?’
‘They said I had a straw on my dress, Your Majesty.’
‘They are jealous. Which ladies did it?’
Melissa hesitated.
‘Which of them did it, Melissa?’
‘The Lady Caterine and the Lady Hermione, Your Majesty.’ She had never thought that women brought up to be ladies would know how to hurt so much.
‘I shall dismiss them in the morning.’
Melissa opened her mouth to say that dismissing two ladies for beating a maid would not cure anyone of jealousy. It would make it worse, not better. But she could not tell Atti she was wrong.
‘From now on,’ said Atti, no longer looking at her, ‘you will be my personal maid. You will sleep in my room. You will always go where I go.’
(Why? thought Melissa. Why do you see me now, when you didn’t before? Because I am a hurt thing, like you?)
‘Did you hear me, Melissa?’
‘Yes – thank you, Your Majesty.’
And she wondered how she could possibly get to see Puck after this.
‘Come,’ said the Queen. ‘We are going to the cells. You must lead the way’
They passed down stone corridors, making their way by the light of the lamp in Melissa’s hand. Many of the household were already in bed, but the castle of Tuscolo never truly slept. There were guards at some of the doors, late walkers in the corridors, clerks in a copying room working in the glow of lit rushes. A pair of councillors, debating something in a passageway, stopped and bowed as they passed. Atti ignored them.
They left the main buildings and walked along a battlemented wall. The wind was strong that night. It moaned in the draining holes and drove thin clouds over the moon. The wall-walk ended in a low door set in a squat, square tower in the angle of the upper courtyard. Atti nodded at it. Melissa reached for the door ring. The iron felt very cold.
Clack! Loud enough to make her jump. The door opened inwards. There was a small, firelit chamber and two armoured men who looked up at them with startled eyes.
‘I wish to speak to the prisoner,’ said Atti.
There was the slightest shake in her voice.
They bowed and led the way down two flights of steps. At the bottom was another door. They drew the bolts and opened it for her. There was a sudden movement inside, like the flitting of a beast in a cage.
What are we doing here? thought Melissa.
Atti had stopped before the dark doorway. She put out one hand to support herself against the stone. She looked down, as if she were concentrating. (No, not concentrating. That trembling of her shoulder was not concentration. It was …)
Atti drew breath once, twice. Then she lifted her head. ‘Remain where we can call you,’ she said.
The men bowed again and left.
It was Melissa who went in first. The lamp showed her a small chamber cut out of the ground. There was no furniture in it. The floor was of beaten earth. It stank of a man’s filth.
The man – the wild-eyed man who had knelt before the King that morning – was sitting up on a rough pallet on the floor. There was a blanket around his knees. He was still in the same nightshift that he had been wearing before. He stared at the girls. They looked down on him.
‘The King considers your case, Gueronius,’ said Atti.
The wild man did not answer.
‘He has not yet pardoned you, although his mother has asked that he should. He will listen to me as he has promised. What should I say to him?’
‘What should you say?’ repeated the man. His voice was thick. He must have been asleep until the moment the bolts were drawn. He might even have thought they were the hangman come to carry him out to his end. But he looked up at them and the candlelight glinted in his eye.
‘Say what you like, only tell me – tell me in what way I am supposed to have wronged you.’
‘On your knees,’ said the Queen calmly.
Slowly the man levered himself from his pallet onto his knees, watching her all the while.
‘In what way have you wronged me, Gueronius?’ whispered the Queen. ‘You and your house have hurt me more deeply than you can possibly imagine. You have hurt me in my mind, Gueronius. You carried fire and sword into places I loved. You killed the faces I remember. All those wounds are in my head still. Shall I wash them in your blood?’
‘I would never have hurt you,’ said the man simply, ‘if I had known you.’
‘What do you mean?’
He gave a helpless gesture. ‘How could I hurt something so beautiful? I tell you, lady, in Outland I have seen great wonders. I have sung for my supper in courts whose wealth surpasses anything our highest kings ever knew. I have seen gardens filled with birds of fantastic plumes, learned secrets of a power that would lay low our highest defences. Yet never did I see anything so wonderful as when I looked up in my own throne hall and saw you there, ready to pronounce my death!’
‘Do not weary me!’ said Atti. She bent down to look into his eyes. ‘How many times a day do you think I hear such things?’ she went on. ‘Men surround me like moths. Each of them swears they would die for me and they speak the truth. They look at me and see beauty. They dream dreams of beauty and want to live in them. Yet all they have seen is beautiful skin. I am not beautiful, not within. I know that. And my dreams are terrible, because you have made them so! Pronounce your death? Why should I not?’
‘Why did you not?’
‘I was not given the chance.’
‘You were. He gave it to you, that tight-arsed priestling who has made you his mate. And yes, my lady, you wanted to speak on me. But you did not know what to say. So you had them let in the King’s mother instead. Maybe you did want to punish me, yes, for things I did not know I had done. But something stopped you. And something has brought you here now. If you wanted to kill me you would do it in another room, with a word, and never look to see what you did. I know this. What is it that stops you? Maybe it is pity. Maybe. Maybe it is something else—’
‘Don’t deceive yourself!’ Atti hissed. ‘Why did I hesitate? Just for this, perhaps. That in you – base, mad, filthy, loud-mouthed – I saw something of myself that no one else will ever see. There. Will you stake your neck on that now?’
‘I do not stake my neck, my lady,’ he said levelly. ‘I cannot, because it is not mine to stake. It is yours.’
And as she watched him, he went on, ‘Let me tell you, lady. I do not fear death. I have l
ived cheek by jowl with death these past four years. Once I lay in fever for days from the bite of a snake. Fever burns, lady. The bite burns until you scream. Shall I tell you of my snake? It was brightly coloured, beautiful. But it crawled on its belly and bit whatever came near to it, because it knew only fear. I do not fear. I do not fear what your word can do to me, for already I burn as I look at you!’
‘Snake, is it?’ cried Atti. ‘And which of us is the snake? Down on your belly!’
‘As you wish,’ said the man calmly, and dropped forward on his front.
‘Crawl!’
‘Not from fear but for you!’ he said, and began to wriggle clumsily, propelling himself with his elbows across the filthy floor. In the lamplight Atti’s eyes were wide as she watched him. ‘Crawl!’ she shouted again.
The man writhed and suddenly he was closer. Alarmed, Melissa backed away. The wall stopped her. She looked at the door, wondering if she should call the guards. Atti gave a cry of disgust as he reached for her ankle and backed away, too. The space was narrow. There was no room.
‘Do not fear me!’ he pleaded. ‘I could not harm you.’ And deftly he caught Atti’s foot and pulled it from the floor, so that she was forced to lean back against the wall for balance. She kicked, but he held her.
‘Feel my fangs, lady,’ he whispered, and kissed her foot where the line of her shoe bared the naked skin.
Atti stared at him. Melissa stared, too.
‘Snakes bite in fear, but I cannot,’ he said as he let her go.
Atti kicked him in the face. ‘Off me!’ she cried. ‘Snake!’
He made no sound. He crawled from her on his hands and knees to the far corner of the room. There he crouched, watching her. She looked at him. And she laughed.
The walls bounced with the sound – the sound Atti never made. Laughter, like the peal of a trumpet. ‘Gueronius,’ she said, ‘you are not a snake.’
He said nothing.
‘I think you are a rat,’ she said. ‘A dirty, filthy sewer-rat.’
He watched her impassively.
‘I will go to the King now,’ she said, with a strange smile. ‘And I will lie with him. He is a good man, after all. And afterwards we will talk together. We will talk of you. Then, maybe, I will decide.’
With that she turned and went to the door. Melissa, enormously relieved, slipped out ahead of her and began to climb the stair. She had gone three steps ahead of her before she remembered that they had left the cell door open. She hurried back down to the bottom. The man was still crouching where they had left him. In that last glimpse from her lantern, as she closed the door, she saw the bruise beginning to show on his cheek, above his matted beard.
With shaking fingers she slid the bolts into their holes. At least these ones went all the way home, she thought. Clunk, clunk, shutting away the man in his darkness. But they could not shut away what she had heard.
They walked back towards the living quarters. Atti said nothing, but as they hurried along the wall she laughed again and the stones rang with her triumph. They reached the royal apartments and entered the Queen’s rooms. Softly Atti passed through the antechamber and the dressing chamber, and on into her bedroom.
There she stood for a moment.
In the far wall of the room, disguised among the panelling, was the through-door to the King’s bedchamber. On the other side of that Ambrose slept, with his servants in the antechamber beyond.
There was light coming from under the door.
Atti stepped quietly across the room. Her fingers drew the bolt, which the locksmiths and carpenter had fixed there during her panic of the night before. She passed through it and said something to the man who was in there.
Melissa heard Ambrose laugh, too, sudden with his surprise. The door closed behind Atti. Melissa was left in the Queen’s bedchamber, with a lamp in her hand.
XXII
The Wall and the Water
o the Queen is holy now,’ said Puck as they sat together on a pile of stable-straw during another Grand Audience.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Melissa.
‘She will go to a holy place.’
On pilgrimage,’ sighed Melissa, thinking of all the hurrying and scurrying, fetching, demanding and rejecting that there was still to do before Atti would be content with her costumes, horses, trappings and escort for the long trip into the south. ‘And she forgives her enemy.’
‘She did,’ said Melissa grimly.
But she did not think that Atti forgiving Gueronius was holy. And she was not sure that ‘forgive’ was the right word. Did you ‘forgive’ a new plaything?
Atti had intervened for him, in a carefully staged appeal before another Grand Audience. And Ambrose had granted her plea that Gueronius should be spared. The former King was banished to his estates with a warning that his life would be forfeit if he strayed outside them or assembled too many men on them. And that, everyone thought, was that. But Melissa didn’t.
‘I don’t like the way she laughs,’ she said.
‘Laughing is good. More good when she has been sad.’
‘That depends why she’s laughing, doesn’t it?’
His eyes narrowed. His words might be clumsy but his mind was as quick as anything.
‘Why is she laughing, you think?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Melissa.
Which was true. She didn’t know. But she saw that light in Atti’s eyes. She had seen it first in the cell, in the gleam of her lamp as Atti watched the man crawling before her. Something had happened there – something big, in Atti’s head. Atti still laughed when she thought of it. And she wanted more.
‘You kiss me now?’ said Puck.
‘No thank you,’ said Melissa.
‘Oh,’ said Puck, sounding dashed. ‘Right’
‘Sorry,’ said Melissa. ‘I’m just not sure.’
He looked so dejected that she slipped an arm round his shoulders and gave him a hug. But she made it only a short one, in case he mistook her. He did not respond.
‘I’m in a bad mood,’ she said. ‘That’s what it is.’
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the small sounds of horses fidgeting and breathing in their stalls.
‘You busy?’ Melissa asked.
He stirred. ‘King travels. Queen travels. Much to do in stables. And I study, too.’
‘The King’s travelling as well?’
‘He will go to the lake. See Trant castle. Meet Outland-man there.’
‘You know a lot, don’t you? You’re very clever.’
He said nothing.
I’m sorry, Puck, she thought. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that … Well, not yet. Not yet. I want to wait a bit and see.
‘Sing me that hill song, Puck,’ she said.
‘What song?’
‘That one you sang at our spring supper in the mountains. Like this.’ And she hummed the long, slow notes that she had heard once and never forgotten, and that seemed even now to be tinged with tears.
He frowned. ‘That is Lament. The World-Mother song.’
‘Sing it for me, Puck. I’m in that kind of mood.’
‘No. I don’t sing that. That is hill stuff. Leave that behind. Why bring her here? You don’t want her here.’ He sounded cross.
She looked at her feet and wondered what the point of anything was. ‘Well, if you’re busy, Puck, I’ll get out of your way, shall I?’
‘See you again. And next time, maybe you be sure.’
It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, she thought as she made her way slowly back to the royal apartments. Of course she liked him. He was clever, funny, nice, thoughtful. He would never be handsome – it was hard to imagine a hill face that would be handsome – but he was different. He had risked his neck for her in the mountains, bringing all that food across the valley in the winters. She saw that now. And he had come all the way to Tuscolo by himself, learning a new language and new things among a strange people. That wasn’t just
brave or clever. That was – well, it was lots of both. And he had just about told her that he had come because of her. She might meet a richer man, but she wasn’t likely to meet a better one, was she?
And yet a voice within her said: No. Wait.
Wait, because something else might happen. Things would not go on as they had done. She did not know why, but she felt a change was coming. And what would it bring?
Could it bring the moon within reach?
Wooden scaffold cloaked the stained and crumbling battlements. Hammers sounded faintly from within the old courtyard. Out on the huge, glittering lake the sails of fishing boats moved silently. The roofs of the hamlet by the water’s edge were bright with new straw. The hillsides had been broken to fresh earth for the first time in years. A flock of goats moved peacefully under the olive trees, sounding the lazy tonk of their bells along the shore. Hearth-smoke drifted in the autumn air. And a thing done with a pen, eighteen months before in Tuscolo, had become real. Settlers had reclaimed the waste around Trant castle.
Below the walls, on the green slopes that ambled gently down to the shore, a gaily-coloured crowd had gathered. The King was there. So were his counsellors and much of the nobility of the land. Among the hundred banners that stirred in the gentle breeze were the devices of Trant and Tarceny, of Develin, Inchapter and Lackmere from the south, of Velis and the Seabord, of Herryce, Faul, Joyce and even Seguin from the heart of the Kingdom. Sunlight gleamed on gold chains, lit bright cloth and flashed from polished steel. Two thousand eyes watched the lake, and the slow progress of the three small boats that bore an ambassador from Outland to meet the King.
‘We still haven’t decided what we are going to decide,’ fumed Ambrose as the boats crept closer in towards the quay.
‘Your Majesty,’ murmured Padry. ‘Nothing will be decided today. He will make a speech of friendship and we will answer. If he makes proposals or demands, we will undertake to consider them. No more. We can hardly know what we are going to do before we know what he asks. And remember. His King is but one of many in Outland, some greater, some less than we. We do not buy from the first stall in any market – not until we have been up and down the stalls and heard what is offered and for what price.’
The Fatal Child Page 25