‘I am not condemning anybody – of treason, or anything else.’
‘We are not advising you to condemn. We are saying only that you should find out the truth. And that if you do not find out the truth – then yes, the Kingdom may indeed be condemned with you.’
The King looked at him.
‘What case can be made for blindness?’ Padry coaxed. ‘Only look for the truth. After, if you will, you may love her as she is. Not as you wish her to be.’
(Oh, honeyed words, Thomas Padry! If treason were proved, what would be left to love? But that thought must not be spoken – not yet. A wrong word would tip the balance irrevocably.)
The King was still looking at him. There was something desperate in the young man’s eye. Something there was begging him to speak again – to postpone the choice that must be made.
Padry closed his mouth and waited. The King looked down at his feet.
‘All right,’ he groaned at last. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Find out!’ said Aun, surging into the breach that Padry had made. ‘Next month, when she goes to Luckingham.’
‘No spies,’ said Ambrose. ‘I believe she’s innocent, and an innocent woman has a right to her privacy.’
‘Even from her husband?’
‘Well, if I go with her …’ said Ambrose, grinning mirthlessly.
‘No, don’t do that. But if that’s the way you want it, you could watch her on the night in question. Just have one of your princes show her to you—’
‘No!’
‘Why not? You’re always telling me that their witchcraft is no more evil than many of the things we do.’
‘I said no spies,’ said Ambrose thickly. ‘The fact that a spy is a prince doesn’t mean that he isn’t a spy. If I had the Cup it would be different, but—’
‘We could get it for you.’
‘Mother would not let us have it.’
‘How do you know that? It was you who gave it to her. I was there by the pool on the day that Paigan died. Do you think I’ve forgotten?’
Ambrose looked helplessly at Padry. ‘Thomas?’
Padry, too, felt helpless. Every way seemed closed. He could not see the Path.
‘I would counsel any course other than witchcraft,’ he said slowly. ‘Every time we resort to it, we risk a scandal as bad as or worse than any cuckoldry. But scandal is not treason. If we fear treason, we must find out whether or not it is true. Therefore, if Your Majesty will not consent to other means … I think we will have to do as the baron suggests.’
‘Very well,’ Ambrose sighed. ‘If you bring it to me, I will look. But I will look alone.’
XXV
Padry’s Quest
emini was a trading town, set on an island in a long river lake a dozen leagues downstream from Tuscolo. The island was joined to the lakeside by a causeway part natural and part man-made, and in the pool below the causeway were many rivercraft. Padry could see their masts as the barge he travelled in approached the town from the southern, upstream side. It was the sight everyone spoke of when they first came to Pemini: the ‘leafless wood’ clinging to the side of the island, with all the hulls out of view behind the causeway so that the masts looked like trees indeed. And you could tell the fortune of Pemini, they said, by how far the wood spread around the shore.
Padry, born a Pemini man, felt a strange mix of emotions as the boat neared the town. He wanted to swallow, even to wipe his eye, as the familiar shapes of the roofs and steeples rose from his memory. No doubt all men who had made good felt such things when they came back to the squalid places of their childhood, he thought, but it was curious all the same. Yes, curious. There was a definite lump in his throat. And the ‘wood’ had spread indeed – there must have been sixty, maybe even a hundred masts in the pool. It looked, too, as though they were rebuilding the old Church of the Martyrs, which had stood ruined since the city was sacked twenty years before. And wasn’t that new bronze on the roof of the guildhall? The town was enjoying good times. And so it should, after all their King and his chancellor had done for traders these past few years!
The barge passed the squat light-tower at the downstream tip of the island, and changed course to work its way back up into the pool. Now they were out of the river current and the going was slower. But the crewmen were nearing their pay and a night in port, and they sang as they pulled on the long oars.
‘South wind, sweeping the waters,’ they bellowed in a mix of voices. ‘Shaking the sails above…
‘South wind, sweeping the waters,
Take me back to my love.’
And singing, they brought their cargo home.
He climbed onto the wharf and looked about him. All along the harbour front the houses of merchants showed new paint and new friezes, even busts and carvings on new porches. There was a new customs house, almost filling the eastern end of the wharf. In the crowds around it Padry glimpsed a number of men in Outland costume. Snatches of Outland talk came to his ear. A long Outland vessel lay in the harbour, with men stripped to the waist stowing bundles of skins under oiled canvas. They worked unselfconsciously, as if they already belonged there, and the down-to-earth, profit-minded Pemini folk hurried past and gave them barely a second look, for they were used to Outlanders now. Behind the harbour front the narrow alleys ran gently uphill, reeking of slop and tumbledown dwellings and ringing with the sound of raucous children. Some things had not changed at all.
In a street near the southern wharf stood the new almshouses, which the merchants of Pemini had raised by public subscription. Here Padry came with the half-dozen young squires who had escorted him from Tuscolo. He knocked at the porter’s door, in the archway to the street, but there was no answer. The door was not fast, so they entered and looked around at the low houses, which were arranged in a small square with a garden of paved walkways and a circular pool in the middle. There were a few people in the doorways: the poor and infirm of Pemini who were allowed to live here. Padry caught one, an elderly woman, as she hobbled past.
‘The porter who works here,’ he said, ‘where is he?’
The woman stared at him: a wrinkled, toothless face that was frightened because it would always be frightened. He had to repeat his question.
‘Porter? ’S him,’ she mumbled, pointing a skinny finger across the square.
There was a man there, dressed in rough brown. He was on his hands and knees, teasing weeds from between the paving stones with his fingers. He did not look up as Padry approached. His shoulders were broad and the back of his head and neck seemed very broad, too. Padry could see the yellow flesh gathered in folds between his skull and spine. The head was hairless and very smooth. It gleamed in the late sun. But there was nothing now to suggest that the man before him was anything other than a man.
Padry crouched down beside him and said in a low voice, ‘Highness?’
The man stopped weeding and looked at him. He frowned. ‘I remember you,’ he said. His voice was low and hoarse, but still a man’s. ‘I do not recall your name.’
‘Thomas Padry, the chancellor, Your Highness. We last met in Tuscolo.’
The frown deepened. ‘So. But let us not use titles. You are Thomas, I am Rolfe. You have come from – from my great-nephew, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want this time?’
‘Your help.’
‘Does he ask or command?’
‘He commands.’
‘Very well.’ Slowly the man climbed to his feet. At his full height he came to Padry’s shoulder and his barrel of a body had a pronounced stoop. And still he seemed to be nothing other than a man now. ‘Is it kidnap again?’
‘No. It is a journey, to the mountains.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘You are to ask the mother of the King for the Cup that she keeps. And you must ask it in the King’s name. Then you must return with it to Tuscolo.’
The prince frowned. ‘I would prefer even kidnap to t
his,’ he said.
‘Nevertheless you are to ask for it and to return with it.’
‘May I say for what purpose the King requires it?’
‘No.’
‘And you came to me because of all my brothers I am the closest to Tuscolo?’
‘Yes.’
‘My misfortune. But the King has also commanded me to serve. I serve the city of Pemini, and through them I serve Pemini’s poor. I may not leave my post here at a whim.’
‘It is no whim but a command, and it overrides the command you have been given. Direct me to the city officer responsible and I will secure your release.’
The officer in question could not be above the rank of alderman, after all. This would be the cheapest bribe Padry had paid in years.
The ancient prince nodded and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He looked around at the court. ‘She does not let me forget, you see,’ he said.
The court was newly built: a square of house-fronts constructed from good stone, whitewashed and capped with orange tiles. And yet something about it teased at Padry’s memory. It was not the houses themselves but the shape and scale to which the thing had been built, and the pool of water in the middle …
There should be columns, Padry thought suddenly. The houses should have a colonnade along the front of them. He felt it very strongly, although it was surely unusual for separate house-fronts, even in an institution like this, to be united with a colonnade. And the pool … It should not be a pool, really. It should be a fountain, even though …
And then it would look exactly like the little fountain courts in Tuscolo, and in Velis, Tarceny, Ferroux – all the places where the first princes had made their strongholds.
He looked sharply at the man beside him.
Rolfe rubbed his face with his sleeve again.
‘When I came here, the building had already begun. The alderman thought the design was his own. He was pleased with it. I was able to persuade him that at least there should be no fountain, or he must pay for an ass and a man to watch it in order to drive the pump all day. But water there had to be, and instead of the Cup I must have the Pool. She does not forget, nor does she mean me to forget, until the day she or I depart’
‘I see,’ said Padry guardedly. She must mean the weeping goddess. Strange how easy it had been, with all the busy doings of his days, to put her out of his mind! And yet she would still be there, in that other world which was an echo of this one, weeping and weeping for a child who had been lost to a cruel hand. And because of her, and despite all the King did and all that Thomas Padry did to help him, men still dreamed dreams. They remembered, deep in themselves, what had been done. And they acted upon it.
He felt suddenly cold, as if a chilly wind had breathed upon his neck.
‘How is little Melissa?’ asked Rolfe suddenly. ‘Is she happy?’
‘As to that,’ said Padry, ‘I hardly see her—’
He got no further. Something whipped past his shoulder and struck the prince full in the face. Rolfe flailed and fell. There was a splash as he hit the water, and cries from the gateway behind him. The men around Padry yelled. Metal rasped from scabbards. They charged, still yelling, at the gate. There was no one there.
‘This way!’ cried one. ‘They went down the street. Follow me!’
He vanished through the arch, yelling, ‘Murder, Murder!’ Others ran after him. Padry stood frozen to the spot. The pool at his feet was discoloured. Dark liquid was mingling with the water. Could it be blood? The body of Rolfe was moving feebly where it lay just below the surface.
No, it was not moving. It was the after-currents of his fall into the pool that made the arm wander so. Padry could see the eyes. They were open, staring up at the world from under the water. Under the water, where he had lived these three hundred years. And that dark thing attached to the side of the head, where the tendrils of blood wavered like smoke, was the butt of a bolt from a crossbow.
One foot protruded from the pool, caught by the heel of its sandal on the lip of the stone paving. The wrinkled flesh, tanned above, pale below; the stitching in the leather; the way the sole was bent almost double against the stone by the weight of the limb dragging upon it: every detail of that foot wrote itself into Padry’s shocked brain.
‘I didn’t think they could die,’ he muttered aloud.
‘Plainly they do, though,’ said someone beside him.
It was Taxis, one of his men: a young squire from near Develin, hand-picked by Baron Lackmere for this mission. In the gateway loitered his brother, Tamian, peering out into the street from which the sounds of a crowd in pursuit came ever more faintly to the ear.
‘This is a mess, isn’t it?’ said Taxis, musing over the dead man in the pool.
A mess? How could he be so …? A moment ago Padry had been discharging his orders, giving his message, arming the King with the powers he needed. And now?
Now a man was dead. A man who had been more than a man, dead from the trivial little punch of an iron-tipped bolt and—
‘What do we do now?’ asked Taxis.
‘Do?’ repeated Padry. His lips were numb.
But slowly his shocked mind gathered itself. What now? A door had been slammed shut in their faces. The mountains were a week away. The nearest of the surviving princes was – well, Talifer was all the way in the south, near Lackmere. Of all of them he was the only one now whom Padry felt he could approach and reason with as though he were fully a man.
There was not time! Not if they were to be back in Tuscolo, with the Cup, while the Queen was on pilgrimage!
Why had this happened?
From the doorways and windows of the almshouse court, faces stared at him. The place was so quiet that the clink of Tamian’s armour sounded clearly as he strolled over to join them.
‘Who was it?’ asked Taxis.
‘Crossbowman,’ said Tamian. ‘Maybe more than one, although only one bolt was fired. I didn’t see them clearly. But Cravaine did. He was out and after them right away. The hue and cry’s up. Whoever it was won’t get far.’
Padry stared at the body in the pool, still wrestling with what had happened. The words of the squires persisted in his ears.
‘Cravaine saw them?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Just this. Why aren’t we all taking cover?’
Taking cover? thought Padry.
‘Because Cravaine got after them right away.’
‘Yes. But how did he know there weren’t others – on rooftops, behind windows …’
‘Maybe they followed us and didn’t have time—’
‘Yes, but how did he know?’
‘Well, if they catch the fellow—’
‘If they catch him.’
‘Why shouldn’t they?’ demanded Padry, rousing himself. ‘You said your friend was on his heels!’
‘Not my friend,’ said Taxis. ‘And that’s the point. This mission we are on – it’s about the Queen, isn’t it?’
‘What if it is?’ said Padry warily.
‘Just this. Cravaine’s a Queen’s man. Oh, he’s a southerner, right enough, like Tamian and me. He came to Tuscolo at the same time as we did. No doubt that’s why he was picked for this. But he became a Queen’s man within a month of arriving. Just one look she gave him and that was all it took. I saw it happen.’
Tamian was nodding in agreement.
‘And he was after them quick, wasn’t he? So quick, in fact, that he might have been expecting this. I don’t know who fired the bolt. But if it had been me, in a strange town and all, I’d have been a lot happier if I knew there was someone there to lead the pursuit in the wrong direction … Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll be back in a moment with whoever it was by the collar. But if they aren’t, then we have some thinking to do. And we’ll have to do it quickly.’
Padry opened his mouth and shut it. His world had turned inside out. He had thought himself safe, guarded, secret. It had never occurred to him that there might be any
danger in this mission. Now suddenly he was blind. A hidden enemy had struck without warning. He might strike again. They knew where he was. Windows, doorways – any patch of shadow might hide a knife or a crossbow. Why hadn’t he taken cover? He had been standing here in the open, too stupefied even to think that there might be other attackers!
Someone had betrayed him.
Who?
He had no answer.
He looked down at Rolfe’s foot. That mute, obscene limb, at once so meaningless and so pitiful! Three hundred years the man had lived – almost as long as recorded history! He had been released from a hell on earth, found himself, was starting anew – Angels alone could understand what a journey had been travelled in the man’s mind! And now the mind had been smashed, the Path cut, the light denied – for a woman’s smile!
He stood at the poolside and shook with his own anger.
‘They’re taking their time, aren’t they?’ said Tamian.
‘Believe me now, do you?’ said Taxis.
Padry clenched his fists. ‘We’re going on,’ he hissed. ‘We’ll go the long way, under the sun.’
He would be late, probably too late. But he would get there. They would not stop him, the damned, treacherous, murdering … He would get the Cup, and bring it back. He would show them how vain and wasteful was the thing they had done here!
‘You think we can do it?’ asked Taxis.
‘I know the way. I’ve been there before.’
‘Then we had better start now.’
‘I want to bury him—’
‘Now, master. Before they find we’ve given them the slip.’
Atti emerged from the throne hall into the sunlight of the fountain court, and Melissa carried her train. They walked slowly, because the way was crowded with young men with brightly painted faces, in brightly coloured tunics and hose, bowing and smiling as they always did, and pushing each other with their shoulders to keep their places before the Queen even as they backed from her path.
The Fatal Child Page 28