Dark Lord of Derkholm (53 page)

We envied the princesses and the younger princes particularly. They were allowed to stay in Windsor most of the year. Court gossip said that the Queen, being foreign, had threatened to go back to Denmark unless she was allowed to stay in one place. Everyone pitied the Queen rather for not understanding that the King
had
to travel about in order to keep the realm healthy. Some said that the whole magic of the Islands of Blest—or maybe the entire world of Blest—depended on the King's constantly moving about and visiting every acre of England.

I asked my grandfather Hyde about this. He is a Magid and knows about the magics of countries and worlds and so on. And he said that there might be something in this, but he thought people were overstating the case. The magic of Blest
was
very important for all sorts of reasons, he said, but it was the Merlin who was really entrusted with keeping it healthy.

My mother did quite often talk of sending me to live with this grandfather in London. But this would have meant leaving Grundo to the mercies of Sybil and Alicia, so whenever she suggested it, I told her I was proud to be a member of Court—which was quite true—and that I was getting the best possible education—which was partly quite true—and then I sort of went heavy at her and hoped she'd forget the idea. If she got really anxious and went on about this being no sort of life for a growing girl, I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias. I really do hate dahlias as a way of life.

Mam had her latest worry session in Northumbria, in the rain. We were all camped in a steep, heathery valley waiting for the Scottish King to pay our King a formal visit. It was so bare that there was not even a house for the King. The canvas of the royal tent was turning a wet, dismal yellow just downhill from us, and we were slithering in shiny, wet sheep droppings while I went on about the way Grandad grows dahlias.

“Besides, it's such a stupid thing for a powerful magician to do!” I said.

“I wish you didn't feel like this about him,” Mam said. “You
know
he does a great deal more than simply grow flowers. He's a remarkable man. And he'd be glad to have you as company for your cousin Toby.”

“My cousin Toby is a wimp who doesn't mind being ordered to do the weeding,” I said. I looked up at Mam through the wet black wriggles of my hair and realized that my dahlia ploy hadn't worked the way it usually did. Mam continued to look anxious. She is a serious person, my mam, weighed down by her responsible job in the traveling Exchequer, but I can usually get her to laugh. When she laughs, she throws her head back and looks very like me. We both have rather long pink cheeks and a dimple in the same place, though her eyes are black and mine are blue.

I could see the rain was getting her down—having to keep the water out of her computer and having to go to the loo in a little wet flapping tent and all the rest—and I saw it was one of the times when she starts imagining me going down with rheumatic fever or pneumonia and dying of it. I realized I'd have to play my very strongest card or I'd be packed off down to London before lunch.

“Come off it, Mam!” I said. “Grandad's not
your
father. He's Dad's. If you're so anxious for me to be in the bosom of my family, why not send me to
your
father instead?”

She pulled her shiny waterproof cape around her and went back a step. “My father is Welsh,” she said. “If you went there, you'd be living in a foreign country. All right. If you feel you really can stand this awful, wandering existence, we'll say no more.”

She went away. She always did if anyone talked about her father. I thought he must be terrifying. All I knew about my other grandfather was that Mam had had to run away from home in order to marry Dad, because her father had refused to let her marry anyone. Poor Mam. And I'd used that to send her away. I sighed with mixed relief and guilt. Then I went to find Grundo.

Grundo's lot is always worse when we're stopped anywhere for a while. Unless I think of an excuse to fetch him away, Sybil and Alicia haul him into Sybil's tent and try to correct his faults. When I ducked into the dim, damp space, it was worse than usual. Sybil's manfriend was in there, laughing his nasty, hissing laugh. “Give him to me, dear,” I heard him saying. “I'll soon make a man of him.” Grundo was looking pale, even for him.

The only person at Court that I dislike more than Alicia is Sybil's manfriend. His name is Sir James Spenser. He is very unpleasant. The astonishing thing is that the whole Court, including Sybil,
knows
he is nasty, but they pretend not to notice because Sir James is useful to the King. I don't understand about this. But I have noticed the same thing happening with some of the businessmen who are useful to the King. The media are constantly suggesting these men are crooks, but nobody even thinks of arresting them. And it is the same with Sir James, although I have no idea in what way
he
is useful to the King.

He gave me a leer. “Checking that I haven't eaten your sweetheart?” he said. “Why do you bother, Arianrhod? If I had your connections, I wouldn't look twice at young Ambrose.”

I looked him in the face, at his big, pocky nose and the eyes too near on either side of it. “I don't understand you,” I said in my best Court manner. Polite but stony. I didn't think my connections were particularly aristocratic. My father is only the King's weather wizard and much further down the order than Sybil, who is, after all, Earthmistress to England.

Sir James did his hissing laugh at me.
Hs-ss-szz
. “The aristocracy of magic, my dear child,” he said. “Look at your grandparents! I should think at the very least you'd be setting your sweet young adolescent cap at the next Merlin.”

Sybil said sharply,
“What?”
and Alicia gave a gasp. When I looked at her, she was speckled pink with indignation. Alicia has even more freckles than Grundo. Sybil's long, jowly face was furious. Her pale blue eyes were popping at me.

I didn't understand what made them so angry. I just thought, Bother! Now I shall have to be very polite—and rather stupid—and pretend I haven't noticed. This was typical of Sir James. He loved making everyone around him angry. “But we've got a perfectly good Merlin!” I said.

“An old man, my dear,” Sir James said gleefully. “Old and frail.”

“Yes,” I said, truly puzzled. “But there's no knowing who'll be the next one, is there?”

He looked at me pityingly. “There are rumors, dear child. Or don't you listen to gossip with your naïve little ears?”

“No,” I said. I'd had enough of his game, whatever it was. I turned, very politely, to Sybil. “Please would it be all right if I took Grundo to watch my father work?”

She shrugged her thick shoulders. “If Daniel wants to work in front of a staring child, that's his funeral, I suppose. Yes, take him away. I'm sick of the sight of him. Grundo, be back here to put on Court clothing before lunch or you'll be punished. Off you go.”

“There's motherly love for you!” I said to Grundo as we hurried off into the rain.

He grinned. “We don't need to go back. I've got Court clothes on under these. It's warmer.”

I wished I'd thought of doing the same. It was so chilly that you wouldn't have believed it was nearly Midsummer. Anyway, I'd got Grundo away. Now I just had to hope that Dad wouldn't mind us watching him. He doesn't always like being disturbed when he's working.

When I cautiously lifted the flap of the weather tent, Dad was just getting ready. He had taken off his waterproof cape and was slipping off his heavy blue robe of office and rolling up his shirtsleeves. He looked all slim and upright like that, more like a soldier preparing for a duel than a wizard about to work on the weather.

“Over in that corner, both of you,” he said. “Don't distract me or you'll have the King after us in person. He's given me very exact instructions for today.” He turned a grin on us as he said this, to show he didn't at all mind having us there.

Grundo gave him one of his serious, deep looks. “Are we allowed to ask questions, sir?”

“Most probably not,” said my father. “That's distracting. But I'll describe what I'm doing as I go along, if you want. After all,” he added, with a wistful look at me, “one of you might wish to follow in my footsteps someday.”

I love my dad, though I never see very much of him. I think he really does hope that I might turn out to be a weather worker. I'm afraid I am going to be a great disappointment to him. Weather does fascinate me, but so does every other kind of magic, too. That was true even then, when I didn't know more than the magic they teach you in Court, and it's more true than ever now.

But I loved watching Dad work. I found I was smiling lovingly as he stepped over to the weather table. At this stage it was unactivated and was simply a sort of framework made of gold and copper wires resting on stout legs that folded up for when we traveled. The whole thing folded away into a worn wooden box about four feet long, which I had known for as long as I could remember. It smelled of ozone and cedarwood. Dad and that box went together somehow.

He stood beside the table with his head bent. It always looked as if he were nerving himself up for something. Actually, he was just working the preliminary magics, but when I was small, I always thought that weather working took great courage, and I used to worry about him. But I've never lost the queer amazement you feel when the magic answers Dad's call. Even that day, I gasped quietly as mistiness filled the framework. It was blue, green, and white at first, but almost at once it became a perfect small picture of the Islands of Blest. There was England in all its various greens, except for the small brown stains of towns, with its backbone of the Pennines and its southern hills as a sort of hipbone. All the rivers were there, as tiny blue-gray threads, and dark green clumps of woodlands—very important each of these, Dad tells me, because you bring the picture into being by thinking of water, wood, and hill—but it still defeats me why I could even see the white cliffs in the south. And Scotland was there, too, browner, with traveling ridges of gray and white cloud crossing the brown. The fierce grayness at the top was a bad storm somewhere near John O' Groats. Wales lurked over to one side, showing only as dim greens under blue-gray clouds. But Ireland was entirely clear, living up to the name of Emerald Isle, and covered in big moving ripples of sunlight.

Dad walked round it all, bending over to look at the colors of the seas particularly. Then he stood back to see the patterns of the slanting, scudding clouds. “Hmm,” he said. He pointed to the northeast of England, where the land was almost invisible under smoky, whitish mist. “Here's the rain that's presently being such a pest. As you see, it's not moving much. The King wants it cleared up and, if possible, a blaze of sunlight when the Scottish King arrives. Now, look at Scotland. There's very little clear sky there. They're having sun and showers every ten minutes or so as those clouds ripple. I can't get any good weather from there, not to make it last. Quite a problem.”

He walked slowly in among the green landscapes and the moving clouds, passing through the wires of the framework underneath as if they were not there. That part always gave me a shudder. How
could
a person walk through solid gold wire?

He stopped with his hand over dim, green Wales. “
This
is the real problem. I'm going to have to fetch the weather from Ireland without letting this lot drift in across us. That's really appalling weather there in Wales at the moment. I shall have to try to get it to move away north and out to sea. Let's see how the bigger currents are going.”

Up to his waist in moving, misty map, he gestured. The whole picture humped up a little and moved away sideways, first to show a curve of heaving gray ocean, ribbed like a tabby cat with strips of whitish cloud, and then, giddily, going the other way to show green-brown views of the Low Countries and the French kingdoms and more stripes of cloud there.

“Hmm,” my father said again. “Not as bad as I feared. Everything
is
setting northward, but only very slowly. I shall have to speed things up.”

He set to work, rather as a baker might roll dough along a board, pushing and kneading at clumps of cloud, steering ocean wisps with the flat of his hands, and shoving mightily at the weathers over Ireland and Wales. The dimness over Wales broke apart a little to show more green, but it didn't move away. My father surveyed it with one hand to his chin.

“Sorry, everyone,” he said. “The only way with this is a well-placed wind.”

We watched him moving around, sometimes up to his shoulders in land and cloud, creating winds. Most of them he made by blowing more or less softly, or even just opening his mouth and breathing, and they were never quite where you thought they ought to be. “It's a little like sailing a boat,” he explained, seeing Grundo frowning. “The wind has to come sideways onto the canvas to make a boat move, and it's the same here, except that weather always comes in swirls, so I have to be careful to set up a lighter breeze going the opposite way. There.” He set everything moving with a sharp breath that was almost a whistle and stood back out of the table to time it.

After a few minutes of looking from his big, complicated watch to the movements on the table, he walked away and picked up his robe. Weather working is harder than it looks. Dad's face was streaming with sweat, and he was panting slightly as he fetched his portable far-speaker out of a pocket in the robe. He thought a moment, to remember that day's codes, and punched in the one for the Waymaster Royal's office.