The Fatal Child (2 page)

‘Yes, master,’ said the clerk, still shaking his head.

Yes, master, thought Padry. And tonight, my boy, you will tell your fellows it was not the blood that made you gag but your master’s wordplay. And they will all say,
Oh
aye!
and together you will repeat all the other things I’ve said to you while these things embraced you. And you will roll your eyes and mock me, imitate my voice and my walk, and laugh until you are sick once more. And I forgive you for it. I forgive all of you, for you have followed me out of love and I know it.

Besides, if a man could not laugh today, he would surely scream.

‘Well done,’ he said, patting the man’s shoulder again. ‘Now— What? What?’

Someone was pulling at his other arm. It was a woman, one of the survivors from the hut. She was dressed like a high-standing servant. Her face was narrow and bird-like. Her accent was so thick that he could not understand what she was saying to him. But she was speaking the same words, again and again, and pulling at him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, as soothingly as he could. ‘We won’t harm you.’

Still she was pulling at his arm and saying the same thing, urgently. Still he could not understand her. She must be one of the hill people, he thought – the heathen, wretched folk who lived in the mountains and the march west of Derewater. What was she doing here? What fate had brought…?

Again she pulled at him, almost shrieking now. And she pointed away behind her.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m coming. Lex!’

‘Yes, Chancellor?’ said one of the young priests with him.

‘I’m going with this one. You’ll have to get the rest
of them out of here. And spare some to keep looking, will you? Find every one we can.’

‘Yes, Chancellor.’

He followed the hillwoman in a daze of exhaustion, out behind the sheds and down a short mews. There was a wall ahead of him. Beyond it was the keep. Angels send that she did not want him to go in there! The mines below it had been fired hours ago. The props would be down to ashy nothing by now. It should have fallen already. Looking up, he wondered if the stonework was indeed beginning to sag as its foundations were eaten away.

The woman led him on, down the mews, straight towards the keep. At the far end he could see a flight of steps leading up to a little postern door. His nerve failed him. ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘We can’t go in there!’

They would shoot him from the roof even if he tried! Whoever was still in there was going down to the bitter end.

But she screamed at him and pulled at his hand. He followed, feet stumbling. There was a body lying face down near the foot of the steps …

In the left wall of the mews was a little iron-grille door. The woman ran to it, looked through and called. Then she turned to Padry and beckoned urgently.

Padry glanced fearfully upwards. They were within easy shot of the keep. Dark slits looked down on him. Anyone behind them with a crossbow …

Hurry!

He came to the door and peered through. He blinked.

For a moment it seemed to him that he must be looking through a window in time to another place. It was a place he knew well. It was the small walled garden in Tuscolo, where he would walk when he needed to clear his mind, and where no murder had ever come. There were colonnades about it and pavements lined with pots of sweet-smelling plants – all the things the fevered brain needed to calm it and set it on the path of contemplation. And in the middle of the court there was the same old fountain with the same wide stone bowl, like a great cup belonging to some giant of legend.

By the fountain, looking away from him, was a child. She wore a dress of rich blue. Her hair was long and dark. She was standing quite still.

Padry gripped the bars. This was no vision. The garden was like the one in Tuscolo, very like. It was bright and calm in the sunshine. But it was here in Velis, and beyond its walls the plumes of smoke drifted and screams still tortured the air. This little pocket of Heaven was surrounded by a hell that would consume it in minutes.

Beside him the hillwoman bent and called urgently through the bars of the door. The word sounded like ‘Atti!’ The child must have heard her but she did not look. She stood with her dark plaits falling over her dress and ignored them. She ignored everything that was happening around her.

Padry cursed and tried the door. It was bolted from within. He tried to force his hand through the bars but the fine iron tracery would not let him.
This is
Heaven
, it seemed to say.
It is not for you
.

He shook the bars again. Useless. He must not panic. The just man should not panic. Nor should the philosopher weep at the pity of the world.

‘Atti! Come!’ called the woman beside him.

He bent and called, too. ‘You must come,’ he hooted. ‘It is not safe!’

The child did not look at them.

‘Atti!
’ wailed the hillwoman.

‘Atti!’ he echoed, assuming this was the child’s name.

She did turn, then. And it seemed to him that it was at his voice that she turned – perhaps simply to see this stranger who presumed to call her so. He beckoned urgently.

‘Come. Come, dear.’

For a moment she turned away once more. She stood in the sunlight by the fountain with all the war and fury around separated from her only by the thinness of a garden wall. But then she seemed to change her mind. She faced them, and came walking slowly down the flowered paths towards the door.

And Angels! There were arrows falling in the garden, dropping from the tops of their arcs near the keep roof! They fell like single spots of rain. The sunlight flashed on them as they tumbled from the sky. But still the child walked towards him, keeping her eyes on his face.

‘Can you open it?’ he said, and shook the gate again.

She looked at him with dark brown eyes. She might have been no more than eleven years old. She was
fine-boned, small and solemn. Her skin was pale, her brows beautiful and dark, her nose finishing delightfully in a curve that was not quite snub. He saw that in a very few years she would be enchanting indeed – if she lived. And he knew who she must be.

‘You have to open it,’ he said. ‘Quickly!’

She put out her hand and drew the bolt. The door to the little Heaven opened. Scarcely believing the grace that had been granted to them, Padry reached and took her hand. It doesn’t matter who she is, he thought. She is a soul like any other, and more innocent than most. Angels, only let me get her out of this!

She was ignoring the hillwoman, who must have been her maid. She was ignoring her with the childish determination of a girl who had quarrelled and had not yet forgiven. Of course the maid would have been trying to hide her, but the girl, frightened, must have run away to lock herself in the fountain garden while the King’s warriors stormed through the stronghold and murdered everyone they could.

‘Come!’ he said, glancing upwards at the keep. (Umbriel! Was it about to fall?) Still keeping hold of the child’s hand, he hurried back down the mews with the hillwoman at his heels. Lex and a couple of his fellows were waiting at the sheds.

‘I’ve another one!’ said Padry. ‘Lex, I’ve another one!’

‘Another wordplay, master? Or a soul?’

Padry looked down at the girl, who still held his hand. ‘Oh, it is a soul, I think.’

‘Angels! Isn’t that the Baldwin child?’

‘I think so. Can you take her to the breach?’

‘We should take her to the King.’

‘To the breach first,’ said Padry, panting. ‘There will be time to find and tell the King later. Also …’ He hesitated. ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘I
think
it would be wise to let Gueronius forget that I sat on his chest, before I see him again.’

Lex’s jaw dropped. ‘That bloody knight? That was the King?’

‘None other.’

Lex shook his head in disbelief. He said something. But his words were lost in the long roar of the keep falling.

t sunset King Gueronius was in his tent in the dunes above the sea. He had put off his armour, bathed and then oiled his young beard with scents. He wore blue silks with the great yellow sun of his house gleaming on them. He had a cup of wine in his hand and had himself poured another for his chief ally, the marshal Orcrim, who captained the troops of the Lady of Develin.

The marshal was a white-haired giant of a man whose age had robbed him of the use of his legs. He lay propped on cushions on his litter, frowning over a chessboard on which black and white pieces stood locked in silent combat. But the King (who was losing) appeared to have forgotten the game. He paced to and fro, laughing, talking, pausing now and then to gaze out at the glowing horizon.

‘Do you see?’ he cried, pointing across the bay. ‘Do you see all the jewels of Velis that they would have kept from us? Now they shall belong to us – and not only to us, but to all men! The sea is ours again, as it should
be.
So Wulfram came from the sea, with three ships, four Angels, seven sons and one thing!
’ His finger swept the wavetops. In the long light of the summer evening they glittered like jewels indeed.

‘A salty prize,’ said Orcrim drily. He jerked his chin. ‘I should have said the city itself was a greater reward for this day’s work.’

Across the bay rose Velis, the second city of the Kingdom, on its pair of round hills. Its walls glowed in the low sun. Heavy smoke still trailed from the castle, blown southward by the sea breeze. Where the keep had ruled the skyline there was now only an absence. Without it the city looked unbalanced. Its spires and towers clustered awkwardly like witnesses at the death of a friend.

‘Velis is a prize, yes,’ said the King. ‘But where does her wealth come from? From the sea. Orcrim, in my city of Tuscolo I have found treaties drawn in secret by past kings, with Velis – with Velis, as if she were an equal power and not a subject of the Crown! To Velis alone was granted the right to trade with merchants from other lands, provided that they met in secret places, neither their land nor ours, and that no Outlander should set foot in the Kingdom itself. Orcrim, did you know there were other lands beyond the sea?’

‘I did not suppose that Wulfram was born on a wavetop. Nor that the silks I have had from Velis in happier times were woven here.’

‘And yet you never thought to ask where these lands might be, or what manner of men lived there! It is vile and heinous that such things should be hidden
for the sake of profit! Now the secrets of Velis will be ours. We shall meet with these merchants. Maybe we shall even travel to their lands, far beyond the water. My lord, when you look over this bay, you see a city. But I see the world!’

Again he pointed out over the glimmering wave-tops, into the far distance where the sea and sky blended into one.

‘I see what a man can hold,’ said Orcrim. ‘No man can hold the world.’

‘Hold it? I dare say not. But to know it – to go and go, to push the skyline back with each step and open new sights to the eye! Did Wulfram himself do less, when he set out in his three ships?
So Wulfram came from the sea!
Did not his sons, when they took the Kingdom for their own?
Hah, Dieter!
’ he cried, throwing up his arms in a kind of ecstasy.
‘Hah, keen-eyed Lomba!
’

‘Your Majesty speaks the truth, as the stories tell us. In their youth, so they did. And (permit me to say it) Your Majesty is a young man also. Young men long to push skylines, even to seize kingdoms, if they are able. But a man who will have something to keep must learn how to hold it – a king most of all. Now I have not had the use of my feet for nine months, but—’

‘Oh aye! To see you riding in your litter to the breach this morning – it was the bravest sight in the world! I shall have new verses written in
The Tale of Kings
. And by Heaven, sir, one will be for you!’

‘Your Majesty does me honour. But fighting men must know where their captain is. I did not mean to let mine—’

‘That is right!’ said the King quickly. ‘They must know where their captain is – by the standard, in command. I did not forget it, sir. Not in the very thick did I forget it!’

‘I am certain of it, Sire,’ said the marshal impassively. ‘Although in truth I was so tossed about in the press that I had no eyes but for my bearers and barely a word but to bid them hold me steady. It is not good to go without legs into a fight. May Heaven allow that this will be my last.’

‘The last and the greatest,’ said the King. ‘This morning, when the stewards refused our summons to surrender, I tell you I all but wept for joy. Was there ever such a fight, Orcrim? I killed all who came against me! Tell me truly, of all the fights you have seen, was this not your greatest?’

Orcrim frowned over his wine. ‘Greatest? Four years back, when I restored my Lady Develin to her house and lands, we struck barely a blow. Yet with speed of horse and a mob of peasants we chased her enemies from Develin in a month. Was this not all that a fighting man could hope for?’

‘A feat indeed, but hardly a fight. I mean your fiercest, or most desperate.’