The Fatal Child (19 page)

‘Will we eat these tonight?’ asked Atti, without looking up.

‘One of them, only. We thread the others on sticks and hang them up to dry for the winter.’

‘Dried fish,’ groaned Atti. ‘How lovely!’

They’ll be lovely when we get to them all right, thought Melissa. We’ll be wanting them that badly in a month or so. But she didn’t say it. She just stood and watched. It was the first time Atti had ever helped with something like this.

‘What did he say?’ Melissa asked.

‘Who?’

‘The King. You spoke with him last night.’

‘Why should he have said anything?’

Because you’re gutting fish, Melissa thought. You, the princess. And looking at you, I’d say you’ve never done it before in your life.

Atti kept on working. After a moment she said, ‘I was getting it again. I was back in the room with the curtain behind me. It was about to open. And then Ambrose … It’s hard to describe. He was standing beside me, looking as if he had heard me and had come to see what the matter was. It’s something he’s done before. Three or four times, now. That was why I left Tuscolo to find him …

‘And he says the same thing each time. I have to turn round and speak to whoever is behind the curtain. I can’t, of course. It’s not like that. Then he says he will stay with me and we will meet whoever it is together, but I still can’t. Then he asks me if I would just like to wake up. So I say yes. And I do. Last night I woke in our room and you were lying beside me. And he said – I won’t say what he said about you. But you’re right. We should sleep in the kitchen from now on.’

‘He can’t get you, you know,’ said Melissa.

‘Who?’

‘The man who followed you here. That’s who you’re dreaming of, isn’t it?’

Atti frowned over the next fish. ‘It’s not him,’ she said. ‘Not any more. He was just a silly old fool.’

‘Who is it then?’

Atti neither looked up nor answered. Her knife sawed furiously at the fishhead.

Fine, thought Melissa. You know, or you think you know. But you won’t tell me so I can’t help you. You’ll let the King help you, but you won’t let me.

And what was it he said to you about me? Was it just
Try to help Melissa if you can? Or
was it more than that? You won’t tell me that either.

‘There,’ said Atti. ‘Is that all?’

‘I only caught the four,’ said Melissa. ‘I’ll do better when I can make some traps.’

Atti put down the knife and lifted her hands. They were filthy and slimy with the insides of fish, and fresh fish blood had dribbled to her wrists. She looked at them for a moment, turning them to see both the backs and the palms. And watching her, Melissa was caught by the Face again. She saw it as if for the first time – the pureness and brightness of it, the simple curves of brow and nose and cheek that would never be lost even in a starving mountain winter. It sat on her head like a mask, separate from the person within, and seemed only a little sad that the world would never be as perfect as itself. Melissa stared at her, forgetting for a moment everything else. Can this be true? she thought. Can someone like this really be alive?

Then Atti dropped her hands with a light, weary chuckle. It was the nearest Melissa had ever heard her come to a laugh.

hill boy got them through the winter.

He appeared one day in the autumn, leading a donkey up the narrow path that led back down the hillside and out to the rest of the world. He was small – no taller than Atti – but then all the hill folk were small, so among them he might have been ordinary. His hair was black and shaggy, his narrow face was brown and already wrinkling at the eyes from the sun and wind, but his teeth were white and good so Melissa guessed he was not much older than she was. He smiled a lot. He did not speak a word that Melissa could understand. But he pointed to the bags on the back of the mule and opened them for her, and there she found meal, a sack of roots she did not recognize, dried berries, dried fish and even a little dried meat.

‘For us?’ she said, astonished. ‘You’re joking!’

He was not joking. He unslung the bags from the donkey’s back and put them into the room in the outer courtyard that was used as a storehouse – he
seemed to know just where it was. Melissa watched him open-mouthed for a moment. Then she said, ‘Wait!’ and ran into the inner courtyard, into the kitchen, and took one of the blankets that she had folded up that morning by the hearth.

Fair was fair, she thought. You got something, you gave something. But also she thought that if there was going to be a trade for the food then she would be the one who would say first what it was worth. She ran back to the boy and held out the blanket. He shook his head and smiled. She had expected that.

‘What’s the matter with it?’ she said loudly. ‘It’s a good blanket. It’ll keep you warm.’ At the same time she was thinking she would try two blankets next, and then the smaller of the two iron knives from the kitchen. And she wouldn’t offer more than a blanket and a knife together, even if he put the whole lot back on his donkey and walked off with it again.

He didn’t want any of it. He waved it away with his hand, grinning as though it were all a big joke.
‘Puka halalah,’
he said.
‘Puka halalah
.’

‘What’s that?’ said Melissa. But he couldn’t tell her.

He accepted a drink of water for himself and his donkey. (He did not like to go into the inner courtyard with the fountain and the throne, so she had to bring a pail out to them.) Then he smiled at her again, took the donkey and led it back out of the gate. When he reached the point where the path dipped out of sight, he turned to wave and she waved back at him.

He came four times that autumn, and twice in the winter during brief, bright spells when the cloud
suddenly lifted and the horrible wind was no longer driving sleet and snow along the mountain sides for days on end. By then she was calling him ‘Puck’, because of the words
Puka halahh
that he always said when he showed her what he had brought. She always talked to him, even though he never understood. ‘You’re like the sun,’ she would say. ‘We don’t see you often enough these days.’ And he would grin and be gone again soon after, for the walk back to his village was a long one and not even the hill people seemed to know how long the weather would stay clear. And she would put his sacks in the storeroom, thinking of the risks he was taking for them, and take the blankets (for he brought her blankets, too) back to the kitchen, where Atti crouched shivering by the low fire.

It was a long, lonely, dreary time. The two girls spent hours and hours huddled together under blankets, listening to the wind. Atti screamed in the night and was silent by day, and the coldness between her and Phaedra grew. One day Melissa looked up from rooting in the storeroom and found Phaedra watching her, sitting on a log in a dark corner of the room which had been empty a moment before.

Phaedra did not live in the house. Much of the time the girls would not see her at all. She seemed to spend most of her days up on the other side of the ridge, where there was a pool sunk in a horseshoe of rocks with great white stones around the top. Melissa knew the pool had something to do with the princes. She preferred not to go up there herself. But unlike Atti she did not mind it when Phaedra came down.

‘How are you, Melissa?’

‘We’re living,’ said Melissa shortly. Cold made her tired and hunger made her cross, so she did not feel much like speaking. ‘We’ll do. The hill boy came last week. He brought us this lot – look.’

Phaedra looked at the basket of roots. Melissa realized that she, too, was tired. Not from hunger or cold, but from whatever it was she was doing all this time up by the haunted pool. Perhaps she had come down for a rest.

‘They are kind, in that village,’ said Phaedra.

‘I wish they’d take something from us all the same.’

‘They will not accept a trade. The food is a gift, for my son’s sake. Ambrose has asked them to help you as far as they can.’

‘They don’t have much, though, do they?’ said Melissa.

‘Not much. But you cannot repay them. Just remember it. Do the same for another when you can.’

Melissa thought of the times that poor hungry hill people had come trying to trade with Dadda in the clearing that had been her home.

‘How is Atti?’ said Phaedra.

Melissa shook her head. ‘Can’t seem to do anything for her.’

‘Yes, you can. You are keeping her alive.’

‘Oh, that. But it’s the dreams.’

‘Worse?’

‘Yes. Happening more often, anyway. And Ambrose – he helped her once, but—’

‘I have told him he must not.’

I’d say she knows that, thought Melissa. I’d say she knows, and it’s not helping. Maybe she thinks it’s you behind that curtain now.

But all she said was: ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Phaedra.

Spring came at last, suddenly, and long after it must have crept into the wooded valleys down in the March. It came with a change in the air; stiller, clearer days and waters running off the mountains. Melissa could see them on the far side of the valley – three, four, five delicate threads of falling water, spilling down the slope to join the brown torrent below. And one evening when she was in the outer courtyard she heard a sound that took her back at once to the clearing by the stream where she had grown up. It was the cry of a goat.

There, coming through the gateway, was Puck. He was shooing five of the animals ahead of him and leading his donkey with one hand. The goats spilled bleating into the outer courtyard. They were smaller, darker, uglier things than Melissa was used to, but they were goats all the same. Melissa whooped with delight when she saw them. Puck closed the outer gate behind him. Atti appeared from the inner courtyard to see what all the noise was. She was in time to see the boy catch one of the goats and pin it between his knees, pulling back its chin with his left hand.

It was a yearling. Melissa saw what was going to happen a moment before it did.

Puck drew a long, heavy knife from his belt. Quickly
and firmly he cut the animal’s throat. Blood spurted in a wide arc across the courtyard stones. The animal shook between his knees. The other goats set up a great bleating and bolted for the inner courtyard. Atti screamed and followed them.

Melissa left Puck holding the dead animal up by its hind legs to drain the blood. She made her way into the inner courtyard where the goats were huddled in the far corner, looking at her with their goaty eyes. She found Atti standing stock-still in the kitchen.

‘How could he
do
that?’ Atti gasped.

‘It’s for us,’ said Melissa. ‘Haven’t you seen it done before?’

Atti did not answer. She did not turn round. Melissa did not know what to say. Dadda had always killed a yearling kid when the spring came, as long as there was a male one to spare. It had to be a male, because the females were too useful. Anyway the flock became difficult to manage if you had too many males in it. And that meal had always been the best of the new season. She’d have been whining at Mam for weeks about when it was going to be. She hadn’t ever dreamed that the hill people would send one up to them, but since they had …

‘Didn’t you see how beautiful it was?’ said Atti.

Melissa realized that Atti was weeping. ‘Yes,’ she said. (Yes, she remembered being upset the first time she had seen a goat killed. But she had been about four, then, and Atti …)

‘It was
cruel
, it was
brutal
, it was
wicked
!’ exclaimed Atti through her tears.

It would barely have felt anything, thought Melissa. All its blood had gone out of it, whoosh, like that. And you don’t usually even look at animals, Atti! You don’t see the birds overhead or the little hares among the thorns. You can’t have laid eyes on that kid for more than a moment! And don’t tell me you don’t like meat, either. You’re always on about how dull it is to eat nothing but fish and roots and meal!

‘They’ve sent it up for us, Atti,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s really, really good of them. They can’t have many—’

‘I won’t touch it!’

But it’s
meat
, Melissa thought. The best thing there was – tender flesh and smells that made the mouth water! After all that winter, too! Why all the fuss over a dead animal? Because it was beautiful?

She hesitated a moment more, torn between Atti’s sadness and the hill boy’s goodness. And her stomach made up her mind for her. ‘Well,’ she declared, ‘I suppose I’ll just have to eat for two, won’t I?’

Puck was in the outer courtyard, butchering the kid. He looked up as she approached. She gave a helpless gesture. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just you and me.’

He said something, a question, and pointed to the inner courtyard.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘She just won’t.’ She laid a hand on his arm and smiled to show that it wasn’t his fault. ‘It’s to do with something she dreams about, I think.’

Puck still did not want to go into the inner court himself, so the two of them built a fire in a corner of the outer yard and cut strips off the haunches to roast.
The air was cold. The night was full of the sound of water, rushing from the hillsides and roaring down in the valley as snows melted. Puck had a blanket, and the two of them sat side by side under it while the meat sizzled on long sticks over the embers and the smells set the juices running in their mouths. They listened to the water and watched the moon rising, and because they could not speak a word of each other’s language they made goat noises to each other and laughed until Melissa got the hiccups. And when the meat was ready they tore into it with delight.