The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

Her gaze slitted.

  “But you are beautiful.”

  “You’re doing it again,” she said. “Saying the right thing.”

  “I know. I’ve been practicing.”

  “On whom?”

  After a while, they began to talk about practical matters—how to get back to Carboneck, and what the princess had done the previous day, and whether they could find anything to eat. Left on her own, Nell had been befriended by a woodwose, who had shown her another stream where she could drink and found her some more wild strawberries and a few nuts from a squirrel’s hoard. “But I ate them all,” she said. “There weren’t many, and I was starving. I still am.” Nathan knew he wasn’t hungry, but he found his stomach yearned in sympathy. “The wose said it was this way, toward the road to the city. I was sort of heading in that direction before I stopped to go to sleep.”

  “Good,” Nathan said. “I think we should start walking.”

  “Can’t you just—”

  “I daren’t try. I might disappear again. Or spirit you off to my world.”

  “I shouldn’t mind,” Nell said.

  “I thought it was your princessly duty to stay in Wilderslee?”

  “Yes, but—I could go to your world just for a visit, couldn’t I? You could dream that.”

  “The problem,” Nathan said, “as always, would be bringing you back.”

  There was no path to follow, only the vague indications of the woodwose. “We go southeast,” the princess said. “Now the sun’s up, it’s easy. You just find a shadow and work out the angle.”

  “The sun moves,” Nathan pointed out, “and the slope deflects the shadows. Also, it’s early in the year, so…”

  “It’s this way, all right?” Nell said. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  They had been walking for a couple of hours when they came to a steep bank that plunged abruptly into a narrow valley. They scrambled down with some difficulty, often slithering several yards in a flurry of dead leaves. At the bottom they came upon the road—a mere track, long unused, hidden in a tunnel of trees. But it was heartening to find it at last—to be treading a route that was clearly marked. Nathan apologized to the princess for doubting her, putting her in a good mood, and they set off rather more briskly, heading due east now, which Nell assured him was the way to Carboneck. She had no recollection of the road but insisted that wasn’t relevant, since the picnics of her childhood were so long ago. After a mile or two the valley opened out, and the trees thinned, and they joined another, much wider track, grass-grown and pitted with wheel ruts. A sunken stone at the shoulder was carved with a double arrow, pointing one way to Quilp, the other to Wilderslee.

  “See?” the princess said buoyantly. “I told you so. I think I remember this bit.”

  As they walked, Nathan told her about his latest dreams—the Traitor’s Sword, Agnis, the Black Knight.

  “I didn’t remember it was her brother,” Nell said, and: “I liked her. I really did. How could I have liked a—a deceiver, a scheming spy?”

  “Young children don’t have very good judgment,” Nathan said diffidently, realizing too late he sounded patronizing. “I expect you were lonely—your mother was dead, and your nanny came later. It made you vulnerable. Anyway, your father liked her, too. Maybe it was a spell.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was she foreign?”

  “Depends what you mean by that. There are lots of little kingdoms in these parts, all close together. We don’t really think of our neighbors as foreign; foreign means people from a really long way away, toward the coast, or beyond the Deepwoods. But Agnis wasn’t from Wilderslee; I’m pretty sure about that.”

  “So the brother was planning a takeover,” Nathan deduced. “The king would be killed in such a way that it would seem to be his own fault; you were just a child; he would get himself installed as regent or protector with no battles to upset anybody, and move on to the next conquest. Politics.”

  “Instead of which,” the princess said, “he was the one who got himself killed, my father was only wounded, and Agnis was sent away. She could have been queen, but she didn’t even get that. She must have been gnawing her own liver.”

  “And then the Urdemons came.”

  “That was a couple of years later.”

  “It’s still too much of a coincidence. Anyhow, she would’ve needed time to cook up a new plot. An infestation of demons would take awhile to arrange. She’s behind it all somehow: I’m sure of it. She still wants to be the ruler of Wilderslee, one way or another.”

  “If you’re right,” Nell said pensively, “then she’s defeated her own object. At the rate we’re going, there won’t be anything left to rule.”

  By midday they had left the woods behind and the road was winding among bare hills crisscrossed with dry-stone walls. They passed the occasional roofless cottage or the skeleton of a barn, and stopped to drink from a well whose creaking chain and leaky bucket indicated it had been long abandoned. A knot of sheep grazing nearby paused to stare at them. They were led by a huge black ram with a helmet of twisted horns, a feral eye, and the fleece of an unkempt yak. As they finished it charged at them, but they vaulted a low wall and ran away across the fields, back to the road.

  “There used to be many farms here,” the princess said, “but they’ve all gone now.”

  They were both increasingly hungry, but there was nothing to eat.

  In the afternoon the weather changed. A thin veil of cloud drew across the sky, shutting out the sun. The wind grew chill. Nell was getting blisters and they paused to rest, but not for long; sitting still was too cold for comfort.

  “When we get home,” the princess said, meaning her home, “I’m going to have Prenders bathe my feet, and rub them with oil, and I’m not going to walk anywhere for at least a week. But first, I’m going to eat the biggest dinner in the world.”

  They kept on walking. Both were tired, but they didn’t dare rest again: they were too anxious to reach Carboneck before nightfall.

  Once, the princess said: “Whose bright idea was it, to spend a day in the Deepwoods?”

  “Yours,” said Nathan. “I think.”

  It was raining when they reached the marshes, a misty, drizzly, grizzly kind of rain that a depressed climate can keep up for hours. The horizon had dissolved into cloud, and the twin hills of Carboneck seemed to be floating above the wetlands, ghost-faint in the grayness of the afternoon and very far away. The road became a causeway, supported at intervals on wooden piles, some sagging or fallen, leaving yawning gaps, or stretches where the ground looked solid but wasn’t, needing only the pressure of a footstep to induce collapse. On either side the broken pools straggled into the distance, interspersed with reed clumps and patches of boggy earth. There were no trees, but the bulrushes grew very tall, bending in the passage of the wind. Nathan remembered his dream of the swamp, and Roshan—or whoever it was—fleeing from the giant worm. (Maybe he had been trying to search for the princess.)

  “The Urdemons live here,” Nell said. “They don’t need acts of magic to summon them. They hear if you try to cross.”

  “How did the people manage to leave the city?”

  “It’s all right if the sun shines. They don’t like the sun.”

  “We could wait,” Nathan offered. “It might stop raining.”

  “It won’t.” The princess sighed.

  And, after a pause: “I’m famished.”

  “Are you afraid?” Nathan asked her. Just checking.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. So’m I.” He took her hand. “Let’s go then.”

  They went carefully along the causeway, trying as far as possible to follow recent cart tracks, in the hope that where the ground would support a cart, it would support them. But no cart had passed for many months, and what tracks there were had almost gone. The rain persisted, turning the earth to mud, and their progress was very slow, and they got wetter, and colder, and Nell began to shiver. “We could run for it,” Nat
han said, when at last the city started to draw near.

  “No. The demons hear everything. Any vibration—running footsteps—will bring them out. I think…they haven’t heard us because of the rain. The sound of it on the ground—on the water—must drown us out. As long as we move quietly…”

  They went on. A little farther ahead, Nathan felt the earth give beneath him. He sprang back just in time, while a whole section of the road caved in, subsiding with a muddy flump into the pool below. There was only a narrow lip of causeway remaining on the edge of the hole, slippery and treacherous in the wet. Nathan seized the princess’s hand again and dragged her along it, though she almost fell twice. “They’ll have heard that,” he said as the path widened. “Now we run.”

  She didn’t argue. She was wearing a dress she’d long outgrown, the skirt well above the ankle, torn by the walk through the Deepwoods into a ragged finish that would have looked stylish in twenty-first-century England. She didn’t have to kilt it up, though the sodden material hampered her, and she paused to rip it farther up her legs. Then she ran, kicking off her shoes, bare feet gripping more surely on the damp ground. Nathan followed, staying just behind her, listening as he ran. He knew the sound from his dream—that deep bubbling, gurgling noise, and then the surge of water as the thing heaved itself out of the swamp…

  “Run!” he screamed to Nell. “Don’t look back! Run! ”

  She looked back anyway, stumbled, got up. Her face was very pale.

  “I’ll deal with it!” he cried, pushing her onward. “Run!”

  In that moment, she believed him. She had seen him in phantom form, outfacing another demon—she knew he could do it. She trusted him—his strength, his courage, his unknown powers. She ran…

  Nathan swung around to confront the demon.

  It was the one from his dream, a monster of slime, its massive neck curving toward him, greenish sputum drooling from its toothless jaw. It was solid, and he was solid, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it at all. He hadn’t even picked up a stick to defend himself. Why hadn’t he thought to go to bed with a weapon of some kind? Stupid, stupid…

  Too late now.

  The mouth came rushing down on him, opening wider—wider—he saw the network of huge blood vessels plunging into the tunnel of its throat. He stammered the words of his uncle’s spell, but he had not that Gift, and whatever had once empowered him was gone. The stench of demonbreath overwhelmed him; bony gums gripped his waist. He was thrashing about in darkness, plunging his hands into a thick ooze of saliva, feeling the moist texture of its tongue. He didn’t know if he screamed, but no one would hear.

  Then daylight flared as he was spat out, ejected upward into the air as an animal might do with a recalcitrant morsel, tossing it up to swallow it whole. Below, the jaws stretched into a giant gape—the glutinous tongue heaved—he was tumbling helplessly into the wet red channel of its gorge…

  He woke up.

  Relief washed over him in a great wave—a relief so intense it left him feeling slightly sick. He was in his own bed, in his own room. His clothes were sticky with sweat and possibly urine, but he was intact. Safe. Reaction set in—his teeth began to chatter—he got up and tottered to the bathroom, tugged at the light switch. It took a moment for his vision to adapt, but then he saw. He was covered in greenish mucus—his torso, hands, arms—it must be all over the bed, too. He doubled up over the toilet and retched violently.

  Annie came in shortly after, roused by the sound of surreptitious washing—not a noise she was accustomed to hearing in the small hours. She found Nathan simultaneously running a bath and trying to dunk his clothes in the sink. “What is that?” Annie gazed at the scum in horror, shrinking from the smell of it. “Have you been in the river? I thought you’d gone to bed. You had a princess to rescue…”

  “I rescued her,” he said. “I think. If she ran like hell…”

  Suddenly, she saw he was crying. She hugged him instantly, getting the stuff on her pajamas, coaxing him to laugh weakly at the thought of still more washing. “We’ll put it all in the machine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Is it on the sheets, too?” She wondered if it was vomit, except that there was so much of it, and the smell was wrong.

  “I couldn’t see in the dark. ’Spect so.”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay now.” He was still shuddering. He’d stripped to the waist and she thought irrelevantly how tall he’d become, shooting up in the manner of teenagers. Too tall for his body—stretched out—ribs jutting through his skin. She hugged him tighter. What would Bartlemy recommend? “I’ve got some of your uncle’s hot chocolate mixture.”

  “Sounds good.”

  She made hot chocolate for them both, adding brandy from the bottle she had bought for cooking last Christmas. Then Nathan told her, not about the white ship and the beckoning woman—that didn’t seem important now—but everything else, everything he could remember, all about finding the princess in the Deepwoods again, and Agnis and the Black Knight, and what had happened on the causeway. He wasn’t either proud of what he had done or ashamed of it, he just needed to talk it out. As he talked some of the horror passed out of him, into his words, into his story, becoming a separate thing, so he could distance himself from it, see it in perspective. Like Bartlemy’s spiritual bacteria, he thought: they had been inside him, like an illness, a nausea in his stomach, a darkness on his heart. But mere words—no spell, just the simple mechanics of communication—carried away the infection, or some of it, transmitting it into the ether. He waited for Annie’s reaction, for the anger born of fear, the inevitable recriminations. Of course, even if she grounded him for the entire school holidays, she couldn’t control where he went in his sleep.

  But Annie didn’t look angry. She sat there in silence, listening, while the skin formed on her chocolate. Even when he stopped speaking she seemed to listen, her face set in stillness, though she had gone very pale. She was thinking: He’s an adult now. He runs into danger—terrible danger—and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t protect him anymore, I can’t tell him Don’t play with matches, you’ll get burned; don’t run into the road, you’ll be knocked down—all that parent-child stuff is over. He knows the risks—he makes a choice—he’s gone beyond my reach. Behind her stillness the panic started to spiral out of control, so she wanted to yell at him, and yell at him, getting through somehow with the combined impact of noise and rage. Sound and fury. Sound and fury. She knew it wouldn’t do any good. This is the worst part, she thought. Being a parent was wonderful—magical—exasperating—scary—but this was the worst part. The part where you had to let go.

  She picked up a teaspoon and began to peel the skin off her chocolate. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t want you to do these things—get into these situations—but that isn’t important anymore. What I feel isn’t important…”

  “It’s important, but—”

  She made a tiny gesture, brushing his protest away. “You’re grown up now—grown so far up I can barely reach the top of your head. What you do is up to you. I hoped you’d be a child a little longer, but…that hasn’t happened. I just want you to know—oh, the usual clichés. I’m here for you, always. I’m here to listen to your problems, make you chocolate, feed you—wash demonspit off your clothes. I’ve tried to teach you things—courtesy, consideration, values—but the rest is for you. Who you become—how you live—if you live—” She stopped, looking down, fingers squeezing the mug.

  “I thought you’d shout at me,” he said awkwardly.

  “I wanted to. But what’s the point? It wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Thank you.” Dimly, he sensed what she was going through, sensed her struggle and her generosity, though he didn’t really understand. “You’re the best mum ever.” And, with a touch of awkwardness: “I love you.”

  Annie sniffed damply and achieved a wan smile. “How awfully American we sound,” she said. “You know English people don’t use the L-word. What we feel
for each other is just…assumed. Unless it’s wartime, and you’re going to the front, or whatever.”

  “Ave Caesar,” Nathan said with a slightly lopsided grin. “Nos morituri te salutamus.”

  The traditional greeting of the gladiators: We who are about to die salute you…

  Annie shivered—and tried to turn it into a shrug. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll go change your bed. This chocolate’s gone far too scummy to drink.”

  While she was upstairs, he made himself some toast, spreading it lavishly with butter and homemade jam. The aftermath of terror had left him in need of calories. As he sat down to eat he heard the singing, faint but clear in the dark of the garden.

  Follow the flight of the albatross

  over the midnight sea.

  Follow the road tide-turned, wave-tossed;

  the white ship waits—for thee!

  When Annie came back downstairs the toast was uneaten and Nathan’s expression was strange and faraway. But that was fairly standard, she thought.

  “Did you hear something?” she said. “I thought there was someone singing, just outside. Bit weird, at this time of night.”

  “I missed it,” Nathan said. “I must have my bath.”

  THE NEXT day he texted Hazel twice and left a message on her voice mail, all without eliciting any response. Of course, she must be still in school, possibly too busy to answer, but he wanted to see her—wanted it badly—though he didn’t try to analyze why. He would have to wait till the afternoon, when he could go to her home. In the meantime he walked over to Thornyhill. On the way he looked out for Woody, but there was no sign of him. At the manor he found Bartlemy in the kitchen, giving breakfast to the dwarf. At least, it was morning, so the meal must be breakfast; it looked like crispy fried wood lice, but Nathan was sure that was wrong.

  “Ye been staying out o’ trouble?” Login Nambrok asked.

  “Not really,” Nathan admitted.

  “Ah, well. There’s some are born to it, come what may.” Nambrok polished off the last of whatever it was he was eating. “There’s trouble around, I’m thinking. I ha’ seen things, down by the river. Ye dinna want to be going that way.”