The Fatal Child (21 page)

‘Did he say that?’

‘Not in words.’

Atti would go, Melissa thought. Of course she would go. There was nothing for her here, living like a peasant in the hills. She had said so often enough. It surprised her that Ambrose was having to do so much talking to persuade her. Then she realized that he would already have persuaded her, and that they were now talking about something else. What? Her dreams, of course. Why did her dreams mean so much to him?

‘You do not have to go with her,’ said Phaedra. ‘You must choose for yourself what to do.’

Melissa nodded. She was thinking that Ambrose had never talked quite like that with her – never so eagerly or for so long. When she had dreamed of him, starving, he had saved her with a few words to the red knight. He had thought little more of it. Was Atti so much more needy than she had been?

‘You must not let her rule you,’ said Phaedra. ‘You are young but not a child any more. Whatever your birth, you are a woman as much as she is.’

You must stand on your own two feet
, Dadda would have said.

But … but what choice was there, really, if Atti went? Melissa did not want to stay here by herself, with only Phaedra and the occasional visits of Puck to look forward to. If she did not go with Atti, she would spend all her time wishing she had done – gone with her to where the King lived, to be in his house with him nearly every day.

The King every day or a hill boy only twice a month? It was not even worth thinking about.

‘I’m her servant,’ said Melissa finally. ‘That’s who I am.’

‘Because you choose it. Here, you can choose. Down there it will be more difficult. And she will need you less than she does now.’

‘He wants me to look after her.’

‘Does he now?’ Phaedra murmured.

Ambrose and Atti were crossing the courtyard towards them, side by side. Whatever they had been saying to each other was hidden in Ambrose’s smile. Atti curtseyed formally to Phaedra. She almost never did that.

‘So …’ said Ambrose.

‘So?’ said Phaedra.

‘I will prepare the supper,’ said Atti. She went on into the kitchen. As she passed, Melissa saw her face break into a smile of its own – that smile of hers which
was as rare as honey-dew. There was a clank from inside as she took up the ladle.

‘I imagine that I am not going to be surprised,’ said Phaedra coldly.

‘No,’ said Ambrose. ‘You will not be.’

‘Well, then …’

They looked at one another in silence. At last Ambrose gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘Well – the pool, next?’

‘As you wish.’

‘Um – supper will be ready in half an hour,’ Melissa blurted out, anxious that some credit at least for their meal should come to her.

‘Thank you, Melissa,’ said Phaedra.

Mother and son turned and started walking towards the outer courtyard. They walked side by side. Neither spoke to the other. There seemed to be a great distance between them.

he girls left the mountains the next spring, after the weather had lifted and the torrents had done their worst. And the March welcomed them. It embraced them with its warm air and its scented, tree-covered valleys where the little streams rushed unseen in the thickets at the bottom. Melissa’s heart ached as she travelled through it, so comforting and well-known it seemed after the cold peaks. And the castle at Tarceny was the biggest house she had ever seen.

It stood on the spur of a hill above the olive groves. The ground fell steeply on three sides from its walls, covered with great thickets of black and white moon roses. It had a large outer enclosure, surrounded by a wall that had been pulled down in two places, and an inner courtyard with tall buildings and towers around it. In the days of Ambrose’s father it must have held more than a hundred, possibly two hundred people. But the wars that had devastated the March had cut its population to a handful. For the last half-dozen years
it had been abandoned altogether. Now Ambrose and his friend the Baron Lackmere had brought nine families to the place. These were younger sons and daughters of landsmen elsewhere in the March, who had had to move away from their homes because there was nothing there for them. There were children among them – nearly as many as the adults – and no elderly people at all. They brought with them small herds of goats and other animals, which were kept in the outer courtyard. Because the castle gates had long vanished, the outer and inner gateways were barred at night with rough thorn hurdles to prevent the herd from straying.

Suddenly, after the long silent days among the mountains, Melissa’s world was crowded. The adults and the older children worked in the abandoned olive groves and fields below the castle during the day, but even so there was laughter and shouting and bustle among the old brown walls as the younger children fought and played, and supervising mothers scolded them. And there were always a couple of the men knocking and banging away in corners as they tried to repair bits of the castle, replacing stones and timbers that had crumbled or had been taken for building materials by the handful of cotter families who still lived on the land nearby. The upper floors of the keep were judged too rotten to be safe, so Ambrose and his friend the baron slept in the first-storey room when they were at home. A stretch of the roof of the living-quarter building was repaired so that Atti and Melissa could have two adjoining
rooms there. Ambrose told them they had once been his mother’s.

‘They were my father’s, too,’ said Atti as she watched Melissa stop up crevices in the walls.

Melissa looked up, astonished. ‘You lived here before?’

‘My father held Tarceny for King Septimus, after the fall of Ambrose’s father,’ said Atti simply. ‘Then Septimus wronged him and they went to war with each other. Septimus killed my father and destroyed Tarceny, which is why it is like this now.’ She looked around. ‘This must be the room I dream of. Only it seemed much bigger then.’

‘It’s
this
room?’ Melissa gasped. She looked at Atti, alarmed. ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘I suppose so,’ Atti mused. ‘I wonder where the curtain was – across that door, I expect.’

She was sitting on the end of her pallet bed, teasing gently at the ends of her long hair and speaking as if she thought it was the most unimportant thing in the world that she should be sitting in the very place she saw in her dreams. Melissa watched her nervously, wondering if at any moment a fit would come on her and set her thrashing and screaming there in the sunlight.

‘There would have been tapestries,’ Atti said, almost dreamily. ‘And joined furniture. And everything in bright colours.’

‘Tapestries?’

‘Like rugs, only beautifully woven. They would hang on the walls so you could look at them.’

And hang them across a door, maybe? thought Melissa. Yes, to stop the draughts, of course. And then any time anyone wanted to come in …

‘Don’t stare at me so,’ said Atti coldly. ‘And close your mouth or I’ll put something in it.’ She stomped to the window to look out at the view across the wooded ridges north of the castle.

‘They’re giving me a headache,’ she said.

She was sulky now. But she did not sound as if she were about to scream. She was just being Atti – normal Atti, if there was such a thing. Melissa shrugged and got back to her wall.

She herself had grown used to the constant hammering of the carpenters. She was grateful to them for the new roof above her. Of course they had to move on to the other buildings in the courtyard now. She could hardly expect them to stop, just because she and Atti would be in the dry! And at least the men were working. What she didn’t like was when they found an excuse to stop work and drink the strong drink they brewed in the outer sheds. Then they sang and swore and fought each other, and not even Ambrose could do anything with them. It had been horrible, the first time she had seen a man who could not speak clearly or walk in a straight line. It had made her angry. Dadda had never brewed anything that made him silly when he drank it! But these men were not like Dadda. They did not stand on their two feet. They leaned on each other, more like. Yes, it got you great big roofs that no one man could have made by himself. But it got you a lot of other stuff, too.

The clay was cold and sticky on her fingers. It was also heavy. Melissa had a whole pail of it, which someone else – bless them – had carried up from a stream bank for her and others to use. She would need nearly all of it. After years of no one living here there were cracks wherever she looked, and any of them could house large spiders or scorpions, or the little lizards that flickered along the walls and out of sight whenever they saw you move. She did not mind the lizards but they made her jump.

‘You must call me “Your Highness,” Melissa,’ said Atti suddenly. ‘It’s important, now that we are with other people again.’

Melissa’s thumb smoothed one more blob of clay into place.

Your Highness. That was what she had just said.

Atti, we’ve been living cheek-to-cheek for two years!

You wouldn’t have lasted a month up there if I hadn’t…

Her fingers dabbled once more in the pail. Her lips moved.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes …?’ Atti had not turned her head. Neither did Melissa.

‘Yes, Your Highness.’

‘So how is Atti doing?’ asked Ambrose.

Hey! thought Melissa. I didn’t go to all that trouble just to talk about
her
, did I?

She had caught him perfectly. She had been watching him from the shelter of the gate as he
harangued a drunken and surly settler who was late on his way to the fields. She had seen him turn and come back towards her and had timed her appearance from the woodstore, struggling with an enormous armload of firewood, so that as he strode frowning in under the arch he had almost run into her.
(Whack
, hit! It had worked just as she had wanted it to, like a stone flying true from a sling!) He had smiled at once and had taken half her load. Now they were walking back towards the living quarters side by side, moving at Melissa’s pace, which was as slow as she could manage without letting him guess that she was being slow on purpose.

Except that he wanted to talk about Atti, and Melissa didn’t. She wanted him to talk about – well, about herself, if she had the choice.

(Anyway, saying whether Atti ever
liked
something was always a bit difficult…) ‘She was glad to leave the mountains,’ she said.

‘And now?’

Melissa thought. ‘Could we get her some tap … um, tapeasies …?’

‘Tapestries? You think that would please her?’

‘For a little, maybe,’ said Melissa truthfully.

He paced on beside her. Melissa wondered if he had guessed at the things she hadn’t said – all those little complaints about Atti that she told to no one except the lizards on the walls. (Why couldn’t the girl be happy with what she had? Why wasn’t anything ever good enough for her?) Maybe he was sorry that she thought them.

‘Didn’t know this was the place she dreamed of, sir.’

She said it to show that she was still trying to look after Atti, as he had asked her to.

‘Didn’t you? She did, and yet she still wanted to come. Is it affecting her, do you think?’

‘Not that I’ve seen.’

‘No. In a way I was hoping it would. I thought it might help uncover things. But the dream – the memory itself – isn’t the trouble. It’s just the clothes that the trouble comes in. I mean, yes, her house was destroyed. Twice, in fact. Once here, when she was very little, and then again in Velis a few years ago. You know how bad that can be. But it’s not the past, for her. I can see that now. It’s the future. She’s convinced that it’s going to happen again – or something like it. You know, sometimes I wish I could set her up in a high palace, surrounded by minstrels and knights in shining armour, so that wherever she looked she could see she was adored … But I can’t, of course. The best I can do is see that there’s a roof over her head and meal in the bucket and clean water in the bowl. Which is hardly …’

His voice tailed off thoughtfully. He was looking up at the living quarters. The unshuttered windows looked back down on them like a row of blank eyes.

‘Water,’ he said. ‘That reminds me. Those carpenters still haven’t done the winch for the well yet. I swear my arms are an inch longer than they should be from hauling heavy water buckets up hand over hand. And Aun keeps saying we have to get them to build us a proper gate, or one day someone we don’t want will come riding straight in on top of us and catch us here like rats. That’s a huge job, though.
Sometimes I despair of ever getting everything done. So …’ He pulled a face. ‘At least let’s get this lot up to your rooms. We want to keep you warm, don’t we?’

She clumped after him up the stairs. He knocked at the girls’ door but there was no answer. He led the way in. Atti was not there.

‘Where shall we put it?’ he said. ‘There?’

‘Tapestries?’ he mused aloud as they stacked the wood together. ‘They’d have to come from Watermane. And just one would cost us all we could produce in a harvest, I guess. But fire’s cheap, and on a dull night it’s prettier than any tapestry. Let’s look at the things we have and be thankful. We’ll help as many needy people as we can, Melissa. But we’ll see ourselves warm and fed at the same time.’