City of Golden Shadow (53 page)

"Bishop Humphrey, he said this was the best way." Despite his miserable, dark-ringed eyes, the boy spoke firmly.

It had been a bad night, full of bad dreams for both of them. Paul was so glad to see the daylight again that he found it hard even to argue, although he was not entirely sure he trusted the bishop's advice.

"He also said there was some kind of horrible something this way. Something dangerous."

Gally gave him a pained look which clearly said that Paul was now the oldest and tallest, and shouldn't burden his younger subordinates with such worries. Paul saw a certain justice in this. He fell silent and concentrated on following the boy through the thick forest tangle. Neither of them spoke, which made traveling a little easier. Paul was heavily distracted: the bright morning could not quite burn away his terrible memories, either of what had happened at the Oysterhouse or of the night's dreaming.

In the dream he had been a sort of herder, forcing animals onto a great ship. He did not recognize them, although there was something of sheep about them and something of cattle. Bleating, eyes rolling, the creatures had tried to resist, turning in the doorway as though to struggle for freedom, but Paul and the other silent workers had forced them up over the threshold and into the darkness. When all the animals were loaded, he had pushed the great door into place and locked it. Then, as he stepped away, he had seen that the place of imprisonment was not so much a ship as some kind of huge bowl or cup-no, a cauldron, that was the word, a thing for boiling and rendering. He could hear increasing noises of fear from within, and when he finally awakened, he was still full of shame over this betrayal.

The dream memories lingered. As he tracked along behind Gally, the huge cup-shaped thing shimmered in his mind's eye. He felt he had seen it before in another world, another life.

A head full of shadows. And all the sunlight in the world won't drive them away. He rubbed at his temples as if to squeeze out the bad thoughts and almost walked into a swinging branch.

Gally found a stream which ran past them all the way down to the great river beside the Oysterhouse, and they followed its course upward, through sloping lands where the grass grew thick in the clearings and the birds made shrill noises of warning at their approach, fluttering from branch to branch ahead of them until the invaders were safely distant from hidden nests. Some of the trees were laden with blossoms, powdery flares of white and pink and yellow, and for the first time Paul wondered what season it was.

Gally did not understand the question.

"It's not a place, it's a time," Paul said. "When there are flowers, it should be spring."

The boy shook his head. He looked pale and incomplete, as though a part of him had been destroyed with his tribe of fellow children. "But there are flowers here, governor. None near the Bishop's. Stands to reason all places couldn't be the same, then everything would happen all in the same spot. Confusion, y'see. Everyone'd be running into each other-a terrible mess."

"Do you know what year it is, then?"

Gally looked at him again, this time with something almost like alarm. "Yee-ee-r?"

"Never mind." Paul closed his eyes for a moment to simplify matters. His mind seemed full of complicated strings, all knotted together, the whole an insoluble tangle. Why should Gally not knowing something like what year or season it was, things which he himself hadn't even thought of until just this moment, make him so uneasy?

I am Paul, he told himself. I was a soldier. I ran away from a war. Two people . . . two things . . . are following me, and I know they must not find me. I had a dream about a big cup. I know something about a bird, and about a giant. And I know other things that I can't always put names to. And now I am in the Eight Squared, whatever the hell that is, looking for a way out.

It was not a satisfying inventory, but it gave him something to cling to. He was real. He had a name, and he even had a destination-at least for the moment.

"Hard climbing now," said Gally. "We're near the edge of the square."

The slope had indeed changed, and now mounted upward steeply. The forest began to thin, replaced by low, scrubby bushes and moss-covered slabs of rock, bejeweled here and there with clusters of wildflowers. Paul was growing tired, and was impressed by his companion's vigor. Gally had not slowed at all, even as Paul was forced to bend almost double against the rising angle of the ground.

The whole world suddenly seemed to shimmer and blur. Paul struggled to find his balance, but in that moment there was neither up nor down. His own body seemed to grow insubstantial, to drift into component fragments. He shouted, or thought he did, but a moment later things were ordinary again, and Gally seemed not even to have noticed. Paul shivered, wondering if his own weary body could have betrayed his mind.

When they reached the top of the hill, Paul turned to look back. The land behind them seemed nothing like the bishop's grid-trees and hills ran seamlessly together. He could see the bend of the river sparkling blue-white in the sun, and the now sinister bulk of the Oysterhouse huddling beside it. He could see the spire of Bishop Humphrey's castle through the woods, and farther away other towers jutting up through the great blanket of trees.

"That's where we're going," Gally said. Paul turned. The boy was pointing to a spot some miles away, where a thickly forested ridge of hills descended almost to another curving stretch of the river.

"Why didn't we just take a boat?" Paul watched the light bounce up from the surface, covering the wide river with a mesh of diamond-shaped glints so that it almost seemed made from something other than water, like moving glass or frozen fire. "Wouldn't that be faster?"

Gally laughed, then looked at him uneasily. "You can't cross squares on the river. You know that, don't you? The river . . . the river's not like that."

"But we went on it."

"Just from the inn to the Oysterhouse. That's inside a square-permitted, like. Besides, there's other reasons to stay off it. That's why we went at night." The boy looked at him with a worried expression. "If you go on the river, they can find you."

"They? You mean those two. . . ?"

Gally shook his head. "Not just them. Anyone that's looking for you. The big ones taught me that. You can't hide on the river."

He could not explain any more clearly, and at last Paul let the subject drop. They crossed the hilltop and began to descend.

Paul could not immediately tell that they had entered into another square, as Gally called it. The land seemed much the same, gorse and bracken in the heights thickening to forested hillsides as they moved downward. The only immediate difference was that there seemed to be more animal life on this side of the hill. Paul heard rustling in the bushes and saw an occasional bright eye peering out from the foliage. Once a drift of tiny piglets the color of spring grass came trotting out into the open, but they quickly fled, squawking in alarm or annoyance, when they saw Paul and Gally.

Gally did not know anything about them or the other creatures. "I've never been here before, have I?"

"But you said you came here from somewhere else."

"We didn't come in this way, governor. All I know about is what everyone knows about. Like that." He pointed. Paul squinted, but could see nothing more unusual than the endlessly meshed branches of the forest. "No," the boy told him, "you have to get down here, lower,"

Kneeling, Paul could see a single mountain peak between the trunks, so far away that it seemed painted with a thinner paint than the rest of the landscape. "What is it?"

"It's a mountain, you eejit." Gally laughed, for the first time all day. "But down at the bottom of it, they say, is where the Red King is sleeping. And if someone ever wakes him up, then the whole Eight Squared will just go away." He snapped his fingers. "Poof! Like that! That's the story they tell, anyway-I don't see how anyone would ever know that unless they actually woke him, and that would fairly spoil the point."

Paul stared. Except for its slenderness and height, it seemed a rather average mountain."What about the White King? What if someone wakes him up? Same thing?"

Gally shrugged. "S'pose so. But no one knows where he's sleeping except Her White Ladyship, and she ain't telling."

By the time the sun had tilted past the topmost point of the sky they had reached the bottomlands once more, a rolling sea of meadows and low hills interspersed with wide swathes of forest Paul was again feeling tired, and realized that he had eaten nothing for more than a day. He felt the absence of food, but nothing like as strongly as he felt he should, and he was just about to ask Gally when the boy suddenly grabbed his arm.

"Look! On the hill behind us."

Paul found that he was crouching almost before he understood what the boy had said; some reflex against danger from above, some old story his body still told, had driven him down. He peered along the length of Gally's pointing finger.

A shape had appeared on the hilltop. It was joined a few moments later by another, and Paul felt his heart go stone-cold in his chest. But then a half-dozen more shapes appeared beside the first two, one of them apparently on horseback.

"It's the redbreasts," Gally said. "I didn't know they had taken this square, too. Do you think they're looking for you?"

Paul shook his head. "I don't know." He was not as frightened of these pursuers as he was of the two who had called at the Oysterhouse, but he did not trust anyone's soldiers. "How far is it to the edge of the square?"

"A ways. We'll be there before sundown."

"Then let's hurry."

It was hard going. The thick undergrowth tore at their clothes with branches like claws. Paul no longer thought of food, although he still felt weak. Gally took a snaking course, trying to keep them out of the densest forest for greater speed, but also away from the places where they would be most visible from the hillside. Paul knew the boy was doing a better job than he could, but they still seemed to be traveling at an agonizingly slow pace.

They had just leaped from the security of a copse and were pounding across an open slope when they heard a clatter from the undergrowth. A moment later a horse burst out and drummed across the open space in front of them, then turned, rearing. Paul dragged Gally back from beneath flailing hooves.

The rider wore armor of a deep blood-red. A helmet of the same color, in the perfect likeness of a snarling lion's head, hid his features. He stamped his long lance upon the ground. "You cross territory that has been claimed for Her Scarlet Majesty," he said, his self-important tones made louder and more hollow by his helmet."You will surrender yourself to me."

Gally struggled beneath Paul's hand. He was small and dirty, and it was difficult to keep a grip on him. "We're free folk! What gives you the say-so to stop us going where we please?"

"There is no freedom but that of Her Majesty's vassals," the knight boomed. He tilted the lance so that its sharpened head wavered at the height of Paul's chest. "If you have committed no crimes, and bind yourself to her in honorable fealty, then you will have nothing to fear." He spurred his horse forward a few paces until the bobbing lance almost touched them.

"I'm a stranger." Paul was still struggling to catch his breath. "I am passing through. I care nothing about local troubles."

"The urchin is an outsider, too," the knight said through the lion's snarling muzzle. "And he and his starvelings have caused nothing but problems since they arrived-thieving, lying, spreading nonsensical tales. Her Majesty will have no more of it."

"That's a lie!" Gally was on the verge of tears. "Them are all lies!"

"Kneel, or I will treat you as harshly as one of your capons, spit boy."

Paul pulled Gally back; the knight spurred forward. There was nowhere for them to go-even if they could reach the trees behind them, it would only be a matter of time before he rode them down. Deadened, Paul slowly dropped to one knee.

"What, what, then? Who goes there?" Another knight now cantered into the clearing from the side nearest the river, this one dressed all in shining white, his helmet shaped like a horse's head with a single horn protruding from its brow-an animal whose name Paul felt he should remember, but couldn't. A wide array of weapons, flasks, and other objects dangled from the knight's saddle, so that his horse clattered like a tinker's wagon every time it moved. "Avaunt!" he shouted. "Or is it 'aroint!'?"

The red knight could not keep a note of surprise from his voice. "What are you doing here?"

The figure in white armor paused as though the question were difficult. "Took a bit of a dodgy turn, I suppose. Unexpected. Suppose we'll have to have a battle now."

"These are the queen's prisoners," declared Lion-helm, "and I cannot waste my time with you. I will allow you to retreat, but if I see you again once I have finished with these. . . ." he waggled his lance at Paul and the boy, "I will have to kill you."

"Retreat? Oh, hardly possible-no, can't do it. She's not my queen, you see." The white knight paused as if trying to remember something important. He reached up and pulled off his helmet, exposing a damp halo of pale hair, and scratched vigorously at his scalp.

Paul stared in astonishment "Jack? Jack Woodling?"

The knight turned to stare at him, obviously puzzled. "Jack? I'm no Jack. See here," he turned to the red knight, "there's prisoners for you. I've had 'em myself. No respect, no understanding of the niceties."

"It's not him," Gally said in a loud whisper.

Paul shook his head. This was rapidly becoming farce. "But-but I've met you before! The other night, in the woods. Don't you remember?"

The man in white armor stared at Paul. "In the woods? Fellow that looked like me?" He turned again to the red knight "I believe this chap's met my brother. Fancy. He's been missing for some time. Always was a rover." He swiveled again. "Did he seem well?"

Lion-helm was neither interested nor amused. "Turn and depart, you lack wit White, or it will go badly with you." He drew his horse back a few restive paces, then couched his lance and pointed it at the newcomer.