There was nothing to do but drive. And so Padry drove. At a crossroads near Parter’s Bridge they came upon loyal riders, who were part of a column returning from the fruitless hunt for Gueronius.
‘My lord,’ whispered Melissa. ‘My lord!’
Beside her Puck crouched at the bedside, looking grimmer than she had ever seen him.
‘My lord – we have paper and pen.’
The baron’s eye flickered. At first Melissa thought that he must no longer be able to speak. But then his lips moved.
‘It’s dark,’ he complained. ‘Can you see to write, boy?’
It was bright day outside. Warm beams shot into the King’s chamber and fell upon the baron’s legs. Melissa was surprised that he couldn’t feel them. He lay as she had left him, with one hand still pressed to his stomach and all the bedclothes soaked in blood. The surgeon had not come. Or if he had come, he had only looked at the fallen man and then had stolen away again. And that foul smell had thickened in the air.
‘I can write, sir,’ said Puck solemnly. The pen, long, white-feathered and silver-nibbed, rested in his hand. An ink bottle of beautiful glass was on the floor beside him. On his knee were documents he had lifted from a chest in the Privy council chamber, closely written with words that Melissa could not read but must mean many important things about land, wealth, property and the Kingdom. Puck had folded the top one so that only the blank space at the bottom of the document showed.
‘Write – what I say.’
Puck nodded and waited. Somewhere close, armed footsteps hurried down a flight of stairs. Melissa glanced at the door, afraid that they might be discovered. But Puck ignored them. His bright, capable eyes never left the man on the bed.
‘To my Lady Develin, in Develin. Greetings,’ whispered the baron.
Scratch-scratch went the pen in the warm air. Melissa watched the lines forming on the blank paper and wondered that Puck – her Puck – could do something so marvellous, and do it so calmly while men hunted through the castle with iron in their hands.
‘The King is betrayed,’ muttered the baron. ‘Haste you to him. Or the years will bite their tail.’
Scratch, scratch-scratch. Puck looked up.
‘Sign that it is dictated by me,’ said the baron.
Puck lifted an eyebrow as he wrote. He was surprised that the letter was so short.
‘Damn her,’ groaned the baron. ‘Queen? Adulterous, treacherous bitch of a—’ His voice broke into a hiss of pain. ‘Another!’ he muttered. ‘Quickly!’
Puck shuffled his paper until he found another blank space.
‘Is the pen sharp, boy?’ said the baron. ‘Will it write for me?’
‘It will write, my lord.’
‘Write, then. To my – my worthy and well-beloved son Raymonde. Raymonde diLackmere, in Lackmere. Greeting.’
Melissa gasped. The baron hated his son. Everyone knew that.
‘Raymonde,’ whispered the baron. ‘I would that you know you are the heir of my body, my lands and my spirit. There is no other. I hold you worthy of it. All the things that should be forgotten, I have forgotten. All that was wrongly done I – I forgive.’
He lay, face half sunk in the bedclothes, eye fixed upon nothing. Only his mouth moved. His words seemed to come from far away.
‘Is it sharp, boy?’ he whispered again. ‘Is it sharp?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Write then. Write that he has my blessing.’
As the pen moved, Melissa stared at the dying, angry man, and wondered if his words were true.
‘There is more, boy.’
‘I am ready, sir.’
‘Raymonde, know you that I am this day foully and by treachery stricken. I am but an hour, I judge, from my meeting with the Angels. Therefore I bid you come find such tomb as they may lay me in, and there have flames lit and prayers said for my soul, for I know that I have been over-sparing of prayer in my life …’
His voice had sunk to a mutter. He paused.
‘Is it sharp?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
The baron’s free hand curled into a fist upon the sheets. Hoarsely he continued, ‘Yet first and above all I lay this on you. That you make no delay, but come with all the force that you can. For our lord the King is betrayed. Bring to him, therefore, every … every horse and spear and man in the lands of Lackmere. And if by ill chance you should come … too late to save him, then I lay this on you also. That you shall make war … unceasing against his enemies. That you spare none who had a hand in the making of this day. So I charge you, as … as you are a vassal, and a knight … and as you are my son.
‘I have finished, boy,’ he gasped. ‘Write that he has my blessing.’
‘I have written it already, my lord, as you said.’
‘So. Then … give it.’
Puck laid the paper on the bed, a few inches from the baron’s eyes. Slowly the baron drew his bloodied hand from his stomach. The forefinger, dark and sticky, hovered over it for a second. It pressed upon the page. When it withdrew, a red-brown fingermark was left below the words that Puck had written.
‘Now go, boy. Ride … into the south. Bring me my revenge.’
Puck nodded. ‘I will go,’ he said simply.
‘Puck!’ cried Melissa.
She stared at him. Into the south? Where into the south? Where were these places? Puck could have no more idea than she had. How would he get there? ‘Ride’, the baron had said. Where was Puck to get a horse? He’d not get one of the King’s out of the stables!
He smiled at her wryly. ‘Puka halalah,’ he said.
‘Puck!’ she wailed. ‘Don’t be stupid!’
The stupid, simple, childish … Why did he think he could do this?
‘Do not worry,’ he said. ‘I am a small one. They do not look for small ones. Only the big. I wait a bit – go when gates open. It will be fine.’
When she did not answer, he touched her arm. ‘We do a good thing now.’
He pulled his scholar’s habit off over his head and lifted his long undershirt. She saw the lean ripple of his ribs under his brown skin. There was a thoughtful expression on his face as he tucked his two papers into the back of his loincloth and dropped his shirt again. Then he pulled his habit back on and twisted round to see.
‘Nothing shows?’ he said.
And there he stood, the clever, funny boy who had come all the way from the hills because of her; whom she had kissed in the stables and who had been so put down when she hadn’t wanted to do it again; who had carried food up and down the mountain valley for her in another life, years ago. He was as lithe and as quick and as brown as her own father had been. And now he was going to go away, by roads he did not know, with bloody-handed armed men all over the place who would kill him at once if they knew what he carried!
And she could not stop him. He was of the King’s party. So was she.
‘You’ll need money,’ she said grimly. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any, have you?’
He shrugged, helpless. (He hadn’t even thought of it! How like him! How – simple!)
She looked around the ransacked room. ‘I don’t suppose I have either any more,’ she said.
But the searchers had been looking for a man, not loot. They had opened her closet, spilled and poked among her things, but they had not got down and rummaged with their hands. Her purse was still there. So was the carved kid.
She took the purse and put it in his hand.
‘Buy yourself a horse,’ she said. ‘Or a mule, or whatever you can get. I’d come with you, but it won’t stretch to two. And I can’t ride, anyway.’
‘How!’ he said, weighing the purse. ‘You are rich!’
‘Not any more.’
‘When I come back, I give it again to you. Marry you, too, maybe.’
‘Anything you say,’ she said shortly.
She hugged him once, and he was gone.
The baron lay, still as a dead thing, on the King’s bed. His fac
e was white and his right hand was white on the bedclothes, and his left was black with old blood. He breathed in gasps so faint she could barely hear them, and with each breath a fresh trickle of red blood oozed between his fingers. His eyes were open but they did not follow her when she moved.
‘Damn her,’ he muttered. ‘She’s sunk us. The lying …’
His head moved a little. He was trying to lift it. He could not.
‘Dark,’ he whispered.
Melissa sat in the sunlight and looked at the gleaming window.
‘There’s a storm coming, my lord,’ she said.
She had never liked him. She had not liked him the first day she had seen him, on the knoll above Aclete, standing with the King. And he had not liked her. Now she thought that she should hate him. She should hate him because he had sent Puck away. She should hate him because he had made her help him do it. She should hate him, above all, because she must sit with him when there was nothing she could do.
It was too much effort. So much had happened in the last few hours that she did not think she could feel anything any more. When I come back, I give it again to you. Marry you, too, maybe. But Puck would not come back. He had gone where the baron was going. And he had gone with a smile.
‘Is it sharp?’ murmured the baron. ‘Is it sharp?’
‘The letter is written, my lord. It has gone.’
‘Spare none,’ the man whispered. ‘As you are my son.’
After a little she took his right hand and held it. It was lifeless. Maybe he could not even feel her touch at all any more. Still she held it as time slipped past, and men moved and called in the building, and no one came near. She held it as she had held the hand of the dying hillwoman, years ago in Aclete. Look after her. That was what it had been then. Now it was Spare none. Why did the dying cast such loads on the living? Wasn’t being alive hard enough already?
Look after her. The adulterous, treacherous …
Spare none. Not even Puck.
Suddenly something huge had been lost – something she had barely known she had. She hadn’t known it because she had always been so sure he would be around that she had spent her time dreaming about other things. Why did she only see this now? And when these armoured men were done killing each other, they would find Puck somewhere. Confident, capable Puck. Simple, brave, childish Puck. And then they would kill him, too.
‘Sharp?’ whispered the baron.
‘Yes, sir. I think it is.’
He did not speak again.
XXIX
Signs at Bay
month later Ambrose’s host was camped at Tower Bay on the shores of Derewater. It was a grey afternoon with low clouds and a low, steady southwind teasing the banners and rippling the surface of the lake. The light was poor. Across the lake the hills of Tarceny showed like clouds, dull shapes with no detail to be seen. To north and south the water reached away and melded colourlessly with the sky.
In a field outside the castle, before a line of willows, Ambrose was sitting in the open. He wore a long, loose robe which fell to his ankles. The crown on his head was new. It had been fashioned hurriedly for him from the coronet of a loyal baron, because the crown of Tuscolo had been lost to Gueronius along with everything else in the King’s treasury. He was reading from a scroll that he held in one hand. His attendants stood at a respectful distance.
Padry limped towards him across the grass. He had been away for three weeks and had spent the last three days of it foot-marching. It had left him very sore. All the horses had gone either to knights and squires or to the carters. Everyone else was using the legs they had been born with.
‘Greetings, Your Majesty,’ he said, bowing. ‘I bring you fifteen hundred men from Pemini and the river, and promises of more.’
Ambrose looked up. He showed no sign of surprise or joy at Padry’s return. His face was composed. But it was gaunt – very gaunt, as if he had eaten very little for a long season.
‘Fifteen hundred?’ he murmured. ‘You said—’
‘Eight hundred I pledged to you. Twelve hundred I hoped for. But Pemini has prospered and knows to whom it owes its prosperity.’
‘Those who have profited from my kingship take my side,’ sighed the King. ‘Those who think they have not, take the other. Fifteen hundred. I suppose it is good. And my Lady Develin brings us six more.’
‘Six? Six thousand, Sire?’
‘Six hundred, but they are all knights and men-at-arms. She has marched them to the lake and put them in boats. We expect to see her sails this evening. The main part of her host is still assembling under Inchapter and Lackmere.’
‘Good!’ said Padry. ‘So Gueronius may hold Tuscolo but he has lost Baldwin and he is cut from the Queen’s lands in the Seabord. With our force to the north of him, and Inchapter and Lackmere to the south of him, we have him in a vice.’
‘So they say to me. Yet they say also that Gueronius hauls his cannon to Trant. If Trant falls, then we are cut from the south just as he is cut from the Seabord.’
‘But our strength is greater, if we are given the time.’
‘Have we time?’
There was something sharp in the King’s tone.
‘He that has iron has strength, but he that has gold has time,’ said Padry. ‘I have brought not only pikes but loans. Ten thousand crowns, from the counting houses of Pemini! And more from Watermane, which reached me on the road. I have secured them against the Queen’s estates in Baldwin and other interests and promises it seemed good to me to make. In truth’ – he chuckled – ‘ten thousand may be gone in less than a month. But our soldiers and suppliers – they will not know how fast it goes. They will accept my promises for a full season now, expecting that they will be paid in the end. And they will be, if the Angels permit it.’
‘I have lost count of my debts.’
Padry tapped his head. ‘I have them all here. All your great debts and many of your little ones. I am your conscience, Your Majesty. The carrier of all your sins. And if I am slain before I can write them all down – why, your conscience will be wiped clean, as if the Angels themselves had forgiven you.’
‘Not all debts can be measured in gold.’
The King’s brow was pale. Little beads of sweat had formed upon it. Padry saw how shrunk indeed the flesh of his face had become. He could almost imagine the outlines of the skull beneath it. The hand that held the scroll lay in his lap. The other was turning something small in his fingers.
‘Your wound,’ said the King suddenly. ‘How is it?’
Padry glanced down at his own hand. A big white scar covered the palm, surrounded by little clouds of red beneath the skin.
‘I am healing, although not as quickly as a young man would. If we must fight this month I shall strike my blow for you one-handed. But perhaps it will not come to that. Your Majesty, I have counsel for you, if you will hear it.’
The King nodded slowly.
‘It is that we send an embassy to Gueronius, with terms for peace.’
He expected a protest. None came. The King watched him with dark eyes.
‘We will propose a division of the Kingdom,’ said Padry quietly. ‘The Seabord, the March and the south shall be yours, the lands around Tuscolo his. We shall exchange Baldwin for Trant, keeping Pemini and Bay. We shall say that it is better for all if we part in peace rather than fight in war. If we fight among ourselves, Outland shall surely learn of it. And that might destroy us.’
The King frowned.
‘Gueronius may accept it, Your Majesty. A fortnight ago he would not have done, but he knows now that the scales tilt against him. Part of a kingdom is better than nothing.’
‘You would divide the Kingdom?’
‘To spare the lives and goods of many thousands of your subjects, yes. To preserve your rule across the greater part of your land, Sire, yes. And who is to say what the future will bring? A division need not last for ever.’
Indeed Padry had started to wonder how long Gueronius cou
ld keep the loyalty of his followers after such a peace. They would wake from their hangovers and find that Ambrose was controlling all the wealth-routes from the lake and the sea. And at Ambrose’s side would be cunning old Thomas Padry, wielding his pen, ready to make this deal, that promise, send a letter or two … And there would always be the chance of some monumental act of caprice from Atti or Gueronius to hurry things along. Why, Gueronius might find his supporters leaching from him like sand-grains in the tide!
‘My rule is no matter,’ said the King.
‘Forgive me, Your Majesty,’ said Padry urgently, ‘but it is. It is! You did not take the crown to break heads but to build schools. Not to slay lords, but to give law. I say this not in flattery, my lord, but because in my heart I know it is true. In this you have been the greatest King of all the sons of Wulfram. For the sake of your people—’
‘Thomas,’ said the King, smiling grimly.
Padry stopped. The eyes of the King had fallen to his belt.
‘You still carry the dragon.’
‘Why … Why, yes, Your Majesty.’
‘Tell me then. Why does he bite his tail?’
Padry frowned. He could not see where the question was leading.
‘In the lore of the Kingdom,’ he said, ‘a dragon is a symbol of Eternity. He bites his tail to signify that the end is only a new beginning. In the lore of the hills … I suppose he takes his tail between his teeth for a better grip, or else the world he holds would fly apart with the folly of all that are in it.’
The King’s skin was pale. The sweat was running off it and into his beard. But his eyes were bright. They were eyes that had seen all hope and love turn to ash. They had seen the future diminish to a tunnel of shadow. They looked steadily into Padry’s face.
‘Both answers are right,’ the King said. ‘Listen, Thomas. The lamp is out and the leaf has fallen, but the dragon does not loose his hold. He binds the world together. Why? Because all that suffers in the world will also be renewed. Every end is also a beginning. So our work, too, will be renewed. It will be renewed, but not by us, Thomas. The child in the furrows, the lord on his throne – they must wait for a little. Only a little. We must leave them for those who come after us …’
The Fatal Child Page 34