The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6)

by Lee Duigon

  “If only you could talk, you could tell us how the doe got away.” But he wouldn’t have believed what Angel would have said, if she could answer.

  “We have to find a place to settle down for the night,” Ryons said. “We’ll go back home tomorrow.” He wasn’t worried about being lost. Cavall would find the way to Carbonek.

  He wished now that he’d given up the chase while there was still light enough to gather firewood and find some water. But something told him he couldn’t have given it up, even if he’d wanted to.

  Cavall stopped panting and turned back to face the way he’d come. Ryons saw his ears go up and was surprised that he could see it. Something had happened to the darkness, and it was less than it had been a moment ago. And he thought he heard men’s voices.

  “Is that a campfire over there?” he wondered. Yes, it must be. He saw it flickering among the trees.

  If those voices belonged to a band of outlaws that Helki hadn’t quelled yet, this was a dangerous place to be. They would have to get away from there. But before Ryons could decide how to retreat, the voices broke into a song.

  “Praise God who maketh kings and lords

  “To rule by His decree,

  “Whose righteousness, in heaven and earth,

  “Is plain for all to see!”

  That was a hymn, a Sacred Song. He recognized it from Obst’s teachings. Outlaws wouldn’t sing a Sacred Song. Would they?

  “King Ryons!” A man’s voice rang out. “Have no fear of us! Come near, come here!”

  Ryons was afraid, no doubt of it. How could the man know who he was? But his feet were already taking him slowly toward the fire. He couldn’t help himself. Besides, he felt he would burst if he didn’t see who the man was. Cavall and Baby followed, the hound oddly silent.

  Ryons emerged from the woods into a wide clearing, and before him rose a great hall of timbers, with its whole front open to the air and an enormous fire burning somewhere inside it. Where the roof came to a peak, over the exact center of the entrance, was mounted a great set of flaring antlers that gleamed as if dipped in molten gold.

  Men were in the hall, maybe two dozen of them, all seated around a wooden table heaped with gold and silver drinking vessels and roasted joints of venison piled high on silver trays. Ryons’ mouth watered at the aroma, and his empty stomach rumbled. Beyond the men, at the far end of the hall, burned a roaring fire in a stone fireplace as big as a house.

  One man stood below the antlers, waiting for him—a red-haired, red-bearded man, a stocky, sturdy man who wore a plain woodsman’s tunic, but a fillet of bright gold around his brow.

  “King Ryons, welcome!” he said. Ryons had never seen such a bright, beaming smile in all his life. “Join us, come in and rest. Take food and drink with us, the kings of Obann.”

  And all the men around the table rose to greet him. Indeed they must be kings, Ryons thought—what else could they be? They were all lordly men, but a few stood out among the others: a giant of a man, with a curling, coal-black beard and a mighty chest sheathed in a coat of shiny brass scales; a lean man, ancient, with hair and beard whiter than the whitest wool, bent under the burden of his years, but with merry blue eyes that twinkled at Ryons; a little man in a scarlet cape and tunic, with a high crown on his head that flashed with rubies. Jewels of every brilliant kind you could imagine studded their belts and the scabbards of their swords.

  But the red-haired king had no jewels on his person, his only weapon a serviceable woodsman’s knife like Helki’s—no jewels, but a pair of bright green eyes that were better than jewels, and a smile that made Ryons want to run into his arms and embrace him. And that was just what he did.

  “There! There’s my boy!” The man scooped him up and whirled him round to face the others. Cavall barked—but with excitement, not alarm. “See, you kings, my brothers—this is my son, King Ryons!”

  “All hail King Ryons!” cried the kings, and the forest rang with it.

  The night passed in blissful confusion. Angel perched on the hall’s antlers. Baby stalked back and forth outside the hall and wouldn’t come in. But Ryons was given space at the table, and draughts of cold water that set the roots of his hair and the soles of his feet to tingling, and juicy meat. They fed Cavall, too. And the kings introduced themselves by name, but Ryons had never heard those names before and couldn’t keep track of them. It hardly mattered. He, who had never had a house or family, now seemed to have both. The red-bearded king called him his son, and in some way Ryons couldn’t begin to understand, it was so.

  Nothing could have been more confusing. Ryons’ head swam. He was immersed in joy. There were no words for it; there weren’t even thoughts for it.

  And in the middle of it all, he fell asleep.

  The next thing he knew, the sun was beating on his face and Cavall was nudging him with his cold nose to make him wake up.

  Ryons sat up with a gasp.

  He was in the middle of a clearing, alone except for Cavall and Baby. There was no great hall, nor any sign of one, no hint of wood smoke in the air. And no kings.

  Ryons looked all around. Had they carried him to this place while he slept and left him? He couldn’t believe the red-haired man would have done that. But where was the hall? Where were the kings? Men who wore whole treasuries’ worth of jewels on their persons wouldn’t go wandering around the forest.

  Angel cried from a tree and swooped down to make sure Ryons was unharmed. Gripping Cavall’s fur with one hand, Ryons stood up, and was surprised because he wasn’t stiff at all and was perfectly steady on his feet.

  “We’d better get home,” he said, “or they’ll all worry about us.”

  He knew what it was to wake from a vivid dream, half-unsure whether it had really happened. This was different. He should have been ravenously hungry, but he wasn’t. He remembered all the kings’ faces and their voices and their song. He couldn’t remember their names, but he remembered what they wore.

  “It really happened, Cavall,” he said. “But what became of the hall, that beats me.”

  It was early in the morning, and Cavall knew the way to Carbonek. It wasn’t nearly so far as it seemed it ought to be. The white doe must have led them around in circles all the afternoon. Shortly after the noon hour, Ryons and his companions returned to Carbonek.

  The Ghols swarmed around him, their questions as thick as a volley of arrows. He couldn’t understand a word they said when they spoke that fast. Helki and Obst and Chief Shaffur came up before he could answer any of them.

  “What’s all the fuss?” Helki said. “The boy’s been camping in the woods and now he’s back. You Ghols carry on too much.”

  Chagadai grinned. “Our father likes to give his children fits!” he said. “If you were my grandson, Father, you’d get a whipping.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Ryons said, finally getting a chance to get a word in. “Something happened.”

  “So have a bite to eat and tell us all about it,” Helki said. He always wanted to know everything that happened in his forest.

  So Ryons told them about the hunt of the white doe and the great hall in the forest and the kings. Helki laughed.

  “Ha! So you chased the white doe, eh?” he said. “Well, something strange is bound to happen to anyone who does that! Or so my mommy told me, when I was a tyke.”

  “But a great hall where kings feasted?” Obst said. “The kings of Obann, dead and gone these countless years? I’ve never heard that story.”

  “What’s that in your hair?” Shaffur demanded, pointing. Ryons reached up, expecting to find burrs or half a wasps’ nest, but couldn’t feel anything but hair. The men all stared at him.

  “Let me see,” said Obst. “Hold still, my lord.”

  Gingerly he ran his fingers through Ryons’ hair. Everyone could see what he was doing, except for Ryons himself.

  “It’s a red streak in his hair,” Obst said at last. Ryons’ hair was dark brown, almost black.

  “Wh
ich means,” said Chagadai, “that this adventure really happened? The king’s story is true?”

  “King Ozias was a red-haired man,” Obst said, so softly you could hardly hear him. “I think,” he mused, and hesitated. “I think, my lord, that by the special grace of God, you have acquired the mark of King Ozias, your ancestor.”

  “Ozias is dead,” Helki said. “The dead don’t come back to feast in halls and play tricks with a boy’s hair.”

  “I haven’t said they do,” Obst answered. “But God may give a boy a special vision—and change the color of a few hairs on his head.”

  Helki went out with Cavall and tracked Ryons’ trail back to the clearing where the kings’ hall once stood. He returned the next morning.

  “There’s nothing there,” he said. “But that’s where Ryons went, and that’s where he stopped. So I guess those stories of the white doe were true—at least in a way. But I don’t see why God should do a thing like that,” he said to Obst. “We already knew our king was of the blood of King Ozias.”

  “We did,” said Obst, “but now King Ryons knows it, too—for a certainty. And he’ll never forget it.”

  “May it help us somehow,” Helki said, “when we go to Silvertown.”

  CHAPTER 23

  At Rest in a Gully

  Ellayne and Enith fled without knowing where they were going—away from the outlaws’ campsite, that was all that mattered.

  In a matter of minutes they were out of the woods and into the open. They couldn’t find a road. Ellayne had a vague idea of where the river lay, but no way to know the right way back to Ninneburky. It couldn’t be far: Nelligg had been there and back within a single day. But even more important than finding Ninneburky was to find a place to hide before Ysbott’s men recovered from their panic and came looking for them.

  Enith was just about worn out when they came upon a gully, at the bottom of which flowed a lazy trickle of a stream.

  “We’ll have to stay here for the night,” Ellayne said. “Go on, Enith, down you go. I’ll help you.”

  At last they were at rest, catching their breath. The gully was deep enough so that no one would see them from the level ground above. In the morning they could at least follow the stream back to the river, Ellayne thought. If all else failed, they would still find the river.

  “Ellayne!” said Enith, when she could finally speak. “What was it? Was it really witchcraft? Are you a witch?”

  “No! Of course not.” Ellayne couldn’t help laughing a little. “No, Enith, it wasn’t magic. It was just a thing—some little thing left over from the ancient times. There are lots of things like it, but this one was special because it worked. At least it used to work; I don’t know what happened to it tonight. It never did anything like that before. It just went wild and destroyed itself. Scared the pants off me!” It seemed incredible, now, that the relic hadn’t burned off her hand or made her deaf or blind for life. It seemed to her that she’d had an extremely narrow escape. She wondered what Martis would have to say about it, if she ever got the chance to talk to him.

  “Where did you ever get a thing like that?” Enith said.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Ellayne! You can’t just go on keeping all these secrets from me! Now I’m in trouble with you, and I don’t even know what it’s about. It’s not fair!”

  She was quite upset—not that you could blame her, Ellayne thought. And it was unfair not to tell her anything at all.

  “Look, Enith,” she said, “it’s dangerous to know about these things and even more dangerous to have one. You saw what that little thing I had could do, before it went crazy. There are some people who know about these things and who will kill to get them. Me, I don’t even know what to call them.”

  “You’re not telling me the half of it,” Enith said. “If I’m going to have to sleep in a gully all night instead of in my bed, I’d at least like to know why.”

  “Oh, mercy, Enith—it’s a blistering long story!”

  “I don’t have anything else to do but listen to it.”

  Ellayne struggled with herself. She couldn’t tell Enith the story of Bell Mountain—how she and Jack climbed it and rang the bell and everyone in Obann heard it. She couldn’t tell her about King Ozias’ scrolls, which she and Jack and Martis found in the cellar beneath the cellar of the ruined Temple. Those secrets had to be kept, no matter what. Her father and Obst and Martis said so, and Ellayne believed them. She couldn’t blab it all to Enith. And yet she owed Enith something: for a city girl suddenly snatched up by bandits, she hadn’t done too badly.

  “Enith,” she asked, “do you believe in God?”

  Enith shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know—I guess so. Doesn’t everybody? But what’s God got to do with it?”

  “Everything,” said Ellayne.

  Jack and Martis were on their way to Obann City. Goryk Gillow’s carriages made good time on the great road that paralleled the river. Flying the flag of truce, they made no attempt to conceal themselves—which puzzled Martis.

  “I’m sure King Ryons’ scouts are watching us,” he said. “Soon the baron will have heard about us, too. Either of them could easily capture these two wagons and put an end to Goryk Gillow. He seems to have no fear of that, but he hasn’t said why.” The Dahai guards spoke no Obannese, so Martis could speak freely in front of them.

  “If anyone tries to stop them,” Jack said, “they’ll just do to them whatever they did to those Zephites who came to Silvertown. Have you found out how they did that?”

  “Oh, I think I know. That’s why we’ll have to escape as soon as we reach Obann,” Martis said. “If we can only get loose in the city, they’ll never find us. I can promise you that.”

  Jack nodded. Nobody knew the city like Martis knew it.

  No one, that is, but Gallgoid.

  Martis knew the streets and alleys of Obann, but under those streets, Gallgoid was superior.

  His preparation for the coronation was to explore the cellars and passages under the palace, to find and map the ones that led out of the city, and to what places they led.

  Over the centuries, as it grew upward and outward, the palace also put out roots. Most of these were used for some time and then forgotten. Some connected the palace to the Temple, now in ruins. Some ran out to the riverbank. Quite a few of them led only to dead ends. Gallgoid concentrated on those that took you completely out of the city.

  He confided in Constan, letting himself into the preceptor’s bedchamber the same night Ellayne and Enith slept in a gully.

  “I doubt my servant let you in,” said the preceptor. He was sitting up in bed, with a lamp burning on a nightstand and a little book of prayers in his hand. Most men would have jumped up in alarm when someone opened their chamber door without knocking, in the middle of the night. Constan’s reaction was to pause in reading his nightly devotional.

  “I dealt with your locked door without troubling your servant, who is sleeping soundly,” Gallgoid said. “I wish to hide the First Prester in a safe place before Goryk Gillow arrives here.”

  “He won’t go,” Constan said. “He has promised to officiate at the coronation.”

  Gallgoid chuckled. “A make-believe crown for a make-believe king!” he said. “And if I rightly discern Merffin Mord’s plans, there’ll be a make-believe First Prester, too. We may as well get the real First Prester out of harm’s way.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Gallgoid explained his plan. Constan listened silently, taking it all in.

  “You’ll ruin the coronation,” he said, after he’d heard all the details.

  “I hope to ruin them all, before I’m done,” said Gallgoid.

  CHAPTER 24

  How the Army Set Out for Silvertown

  “I don’t know which way is Ninneburky,” Ellayne said.

  It was the morning after an uncomfortable night in the gully, and no breakfast.

  “It can’t be very far away,” Enith said.


  “I know. But which way? That’s the question. We don’t know whether the outlaws’ camp was upriver or downriver from the town.”

  “So let’s find someone and ask! There must be somebody, somewhere. And I’m hungry.”

  “We can at least go back to the river,” Ellayne said. “All we have to do is go north. We can’t miss it.”

  They began their trek in search of the river. There was really nothing else to do. It couldn’t be more than a mile or two distant.

  “Have you really been to all those faraway places?” Enith asked, harking back to their talk during the long night in the gully. “And did God really send you on those journeys?”