The Fatal Child (52 page)

There was a pike by his foot. He picked it up. The head was gone. He found another. Then he realized he could not use it because of the old wound in his hand.

Shakily, the men of Pemini drew themselves into a tight knot on the ridge-top, facing all ways, pikes lowered like the spines of a sea-plant in the bay of Velis. Padry tried to count how many fewer they were than they had been. A third? A half? And Hawskill, too, was gone. Many of those still with him were dazed, bloodied, one-handed or limping. The slopes were covered with still bodies. Someone out there was keening, on and on – a witless sound. Crows and kites were beginning to hop and pick at those furthest from the standing men. (Think of lying there, shocked, bleeding, helpless. And the flutter and light scratching of the thing landing on your shoulder. The black shape of it might be the last thing you would see as its beak lunged in towards your eye …)

More horses’ hooves. More red-and-white-chequered
knights came riding up to the rough clump of Pemini spears. Among them was the lady herself, Sophia of Develin. She wore a brown riding cloak and the black of her robes showed beneath it. Her face was calm.

‘Well stood, Pemini,’ she said. ‘You are brave men. All the world knows it.’

The men looked up at her. Padry realized he must say something. ‘A cheer, you fellows. Hurrah!’

They did cheer, for what it was worth. The lady nodded calmly and looked north along the ridge as though she was a little surprised to see enemy where she had expected to find more of the King’s men.

‘Are there none of Watermane left?’ Padry heard her ask.

‘There’s that rabble down by the lakeside, my lady,’ said Hob, her chamberlain. ‘But I doubt there’s any more fight in them.’

‘Let us go and see,’ she said. And they turned their mounts and disappeared down the lakeside slope.

A group of crows were squabbling over a body thirty yards away. Their harsh cawing mocked Padry’s brain as he tried to think what more might be done.

‘Where are our bowmen?’ he asked the man beside him.

The man shrugged. He did not know.

‘Flat, mostly,’ said another voice.

‘Stand fast, boys,’ Padry said.

There was nothing else to say. Stand fast. (The dragon. The dragon.)

‘They’re coming,’ someone said.

The enemy were coming.

How could they? Padry thought. How could they still want more? But they were coming indeed. The mass of Seguin’s men, backed by mounted knights, was inching towards them along the ridge. And down in the valley pikemen were rallying again under the banners of the Sun. Soon they would be climbing back up the slope, aiming to take him in the flank as he fought Seguin on the ridge. Damn them! Damn them! There was nothing he could do.

And now, once again, that hateful hiss and rattle of falling bolts, and a man crying with sudden pain.

‘Heads down,’ he called unnecessarily.

He looked as his feet and thought: The dragon, the dragon.

More bolts. He had almost no bowmen of his own. The enemy could stand off and shoot at leisure. They could wait until the pikemen climbed the slope and then hit him from both sides at once. He was fainting from thirst and his limbs were shaking. What could he do? Nothing.

‘Stand fast. Steady, boys.’ The dragon. The dragon.

More bolts, and one slamming into his helmet with a force that made him reel. He could hear the enemy now, yelling their war-cries, jeering at him, coming in to kill.

‘You bastards!’ he sobbed.
‘You bastards!’

Then it began again.

Melissa watched in despair. Across the valley, the army of Gueronius was closing once again on the men who
held the ridge. They were coming from the right, the left and the front, like a big loose fist. She saw the black flecks that were crows leave off picking at the dead and fly in lazy, low arcs off to a safe distance from the advancing soldiers. She could hear the shouting as the lines approached on another. And when they closed she heard again that curious, surging rattle which seemed to hide rather than reveal what was really happening among the armoured men. She watched it sullenly, hating it. She only wanted it to be over. And it seemed that it never would.

‘No man should treat an animal like that,’ said the Queen.

Atti was not watching the fight. Her eyes were on a mounted knight who had emerged from the olive trees forty yards away. The knight was standing in his stirrups, looking around him, looking at the armies across the valley. And yes, Melissa could see that his horse had been ridden hard. Both it and the rider were caked with mud. Its drapes, blue and white, were rent as if it had pushed through bushes. Its hide, where she could see it, had lost its sheen and was caked with pale, dried sweat. Its flanks were marked from the spurs. There was something strange about the line of muscles under the belly.

With the Kingdom tearing itself to pieces in the field, the Queen looked at the hard-ridden horse and frowned.

‘Bring that man to me,’ she said firmly. ‘I want to speak with him.’

As if he had heard her, the mounted man turned
his horse’s head and walked it along the slope towards them. A wolf-head leered on his blue-and-white surplice. Behind him more horsemen were emerging from the trees.

One of the Queen’s guards strolled towards the oncoming knight and lifted a hand in greeting. The rider let his horse amble up to him and also lifted his hand. It held a small axe.

Melissa saw the blade fall. It seemed to move very slowly as she stood still and the guard stood still to take the blow. It caught him on the side of the head below the helmet. He fell at once and blood spurted like an obscene fountain into the air.

Hooves and screams! Horsemen, riding at them! Melissa gripped the back of the Queen’s chair. The knights around her shouted in alarm. Some drew their weapons. The horsemen were on them, huge and black on their mounts. Melissa shrieked. Iron clashed. Soldiers were reeling. There was blood wherever she looked. An unarmed servant ran screaming between the horses and a sword came down to drop him bubbling at her feet. Then she and Atti were surrounded by the riders, and there was no one else left.

Atti rose, pushing Melissa gently aside as she clutched at her. Her face was pale. She said nothing.

‘You are my prisoner, lady,’ said the wolf-knight harshly.

‘I do not doubt it,’ said the Queen.

The knight turned his horse. All the slope seemed to be covered with armoured horsemen. More horses were coming out of the olive grove all the time.

‘Sandes, wait you here and assemble the foot. Then take them to the left and down the stream to aid the King.’

‘To the King. Yes, my lord.’

‘Knights!’ roared the ragged leader. ‘Squires! Follow me!’

He set his great tired mount off at a walk down the slope. With a clattering and churning of hooves his knights drew around him. There seemed to be very many of them, following in an armoured cloud after the pikemen in the valley, who were still moving away up the far slope.

‘And howl, my cubs! Howl! Let them know who’s on them!’

A ghastly wailing broke from five hundred iron helms.
‘Ahoo! Lackmere! Ahoo
.’ At a slow trot they lumbered down into the valley. Ahead of them Gueronius’s pikemen were still moving away up the far slope to join the fight on the ridge. They had not seen what was coming. The horsemen reached the bottom of the valley. Their pace checked with the far slope. Now they climbed it slowly, almost as slowly, it seemed, as the men they were following. And yet the gap between them was narrowing. Surely the pikemen must have heard them now. Melissa thought some in the rear rank were turning, looking behind them. The pikemen wavered, and halted.

The horsemen rode straight in among them. And the mass of pikemen seemed to burst like the slow explosion of thistledown under a breath of wind. Left and right men fled, dropping their weapons, running,
with horsemen after them, murdering them as they ran.

‘You keep your eye on these women,’ an armoured knight was saying near her. ‘Keep them close and out of trouble. I want to find them unharmed at evening.’

‘And after that?’ said one of his soldiers.

‘That’s not for you or me to say.’

And all the while more horses were coming out of the olive groves. These were smaller animals, with no drapes or armour but covered in mud and sweat. Their riders wore leather or mail and carried pikes and crossbows. They dropped from their saddles and waddled stiffly into the fast-growing mass of footmen assembling on the slope. Their banners were blue and white and the head of a wolf was stitched crudely on each.

‘This way!’ called their leader. ‘March! And give tongue there. Give tongue!’

Again that eerie howling, as if a multitude of demons had possessed the souls of the men before her. It seemed like a dream – like a nightmare as they passed. And just as in a nightmare, Melissa saw Puck among them.

She saw his face, framed in a leather cap that was not his, passing her with the other men. His eyes were half shut and his lips pursed in the long, trailing cry that rose from a thousand throats.

‘Ahoo! Lackmere! Ahoo
.’

In the dusk of that day Padry was at the stream below the stand of oaks. Above him the tumbled shape of Trant castle was black against the sky. Behind him,
arranged along the banks, a company of Lackmere’s men were pitching camp. Some of them were lighting fires. Others stood to arms watching the castle, for Gueronius and the knights who had fought alongside him all day were still up there. There he had sought to rally his men after their collapse at Lackmere’s assault, and there he had been caught by the arrival at last of Inchapter’s columns from the south. Now he was ringed in the stronghold he had broken, by a force far greater than the remnants left to him. And the end would come to him in the morning through the breach his own cannon had made.

Padry sat on the turf watching a half-dozen Pemini men wading in the water. They were feeling with their toes for bodies lying on the bed of the stream. All up and down the banks others were doing the same. Now and again a cry would go up, men would gather round and another heavily armoured corpse would be dragged clear of the mud. The men splashed to and fro, moving stiffly. One of them was singing in a low grumble the old lake-sailor’s tune, ‘South Wind’. He made it sound like a dirge. Padry wished he would stop.

As he sat on the cool bank and watched the searchers in the water, the past day seemed like a dream from which he had just woken. Then, as in a dream, he had been someone else – a madman, smashing and yelling and all the time waiting for the fatal blow to come on him from somewhere unseen. Now he was Thomas Padry again, teacher, philosopher and King’s scribe. He found it hard to remember how
he had gone from one to the other. Yet plainly he had. And nothing felt more likely than that the nightmare would come on him again, suddenly, and that he would find himself thrashing around once more in the iron and blood, in a dream that would never end.

‘South wind, sweeping the waters …
’ droned the man in the stream.

Oh, shut up, thought Padry.

‘Take me back to my—
Here!’ He broke off. ‘This is him, isn’t it?’

Shivering, others splashed over.

‘There. That’s his arm. Hold it … Get his legs … Lift…’

An armoured head broke the surface of the water. A plume of drenched and broken yellow feathers. A surplice of yellow that was smeared black with the mud of the stream-bed. The dead man was held in a sitting position as though he were having a bath.

‘Lift…’

‘It’s him all right’

Dripping and filthy, the corpse of young Hugo Delverdis was drawn from the stream. They gathered round him. In the half-light Padry could see no obvious wound. Perhaps the poor fellow had just been thrown from his horse and drowned. What difference that might make to the elderly father who had sent him here, Padry could not guess.

He was kneeling by the body, offering a short prayer, when light fell about him – the weak, warm glow of a lantern. He looked up. A woman in a dull habit stood over him with a light in her hand.

‘My lady,’ he said.

‘My poor Thomas,’ said Phaedra. ‘Is it well with you?’

‘It is better with me than with many, my lady.’ He climbed wearily to his feet. ‘I did not know you were here.’

‘I followed you down the lake,’ she said. ‘I came by my ways and was not in danger. I thought perhaps I might snatch my son to safety if all went badly. And very nearly I did. But in the end it was not necessary.’

‘No,’ he said.

They looked together at the dead man before them.

‘Delverdis,’ she said, looking at the arms on the surplice. ‘I had a friend in that house once. But they have not been lucky.’

‘And the King – is it well with him?’

‘He took no hurt today. But no, it is not well.’

‘Where is he?’

‘They have brought him to Manor Gowden.’ She sighed. ‘There is a council. He sent me to find you.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘The Queen has been taken. They will judge her.’

Padry looked at his feet. ‘Must I be part of it?’

He did not want to judge Atti. What could the sentence be? Death, most likely. Why must he have a hand in that?

‘I do not know where it is,’ he said plaintively.

‘These were my father’s manors at one time. I will take you there.’

So he left the stream side and followed her. He
moved slowly because it was nearly dark and because he was exhausted after the long day. They climbed the far bank and circled the castle at a distance, moving among the camps of Lackmere’s and Inchapter’s men, some of whom were still coming in after marching for a night and two days. There seemed to be very many of them, limping and calling and crouching around new campfires in the darkness. The southern host was larger than either of the armies that had fought that morning. And Padry knew that this was exactly why the knights of the north had been so unwilling to wait for them. This was why the young Delverdis and so many others had gone to their deaths in the stream. Because tonight the King’s victory rested on the south. The south had won, although only Lackmere’s knights and those of the footmen that he could put on horseback had arrived in time to strike a blow. The south – Develin, Lackmere, Inchapter – would dictate the division of the spoils.