The Perilous Gard (16 page)

"You live without it," Kate insisted.

"We are not of your kind," said the Lady. "Do you think you could live as we do?"

Kate stiffened. She did not mind the question: it was the tone of the voice that stung her past bearing.

"I don't know how you live," she retorted. "But why should your land be any more dreadful to me than it is to you?"

"You would find that out soon enough if you tried it," said the Lady. "And then you would come to me crying and begging for what I have offered you freely."

"Well, couldn't I have till then?" asked Kate doggedly.

"Do not be impudent, girl!" said Master John. "Madam, if you want her to drink it, I can easily — "

The Lady did not even glance at him. Her eyes were still on Kate's face, and they as well as her mouth now looked very faintly amused.

"You may have till you please," she replied. "It will all be the same in the end." She set the cup down on the little table beside the platter of fruit and drew a narrow strip of green silk from somewhere under her cloak.

"What is that for?" inquired Kate, apprehensively.

"To tie over your eyes," said the Lady. "And in this I can give you no choice, for you must not see the way that we are going."

The last thing that Kate actually did see, with curious distinctness, was the cup standing on the little table and gleaming softly in the light of the fire. It was a plain silver cup, one of a set that were used every day at the high table. The next instant it disappeared as the silk closed over her race. A breath of cold air from the terrace door blew against her cheek.

"Take hold of my cloak," said the Lady's voice.

Kate clutched at the fold of cloth that was put into her hand, and feeling ridiculously like a puppy on a lead, stumbled behind the Lady down the terrace steps and across the familiar paving stones of the courtyard. Presently they paused; there was a creak of hinges, and when they began to move again it was over a rough board floor. The air was suddenly close and heavy with the dry sweet smell of stored grain.

For a moment Kate could not tell where they had gone; then she remembered all the times she had seen carters unloading sacks of corn at the dark arch across the courtyard from her window, and understood. They were in Lord Richard's tower. The secret way that they were to follow must begin there.

She took a quick, excited step forward, and was told to keep herself further back.

Kate fell back obediently. It did not matter. She had the answer now to a number of questions that had been puzzling her — why Master John sent so many household supplies to the old tower, instead of the cellars in the new wing; why there was never any other outward evidence of his trade with the Fairy Folk. A secret entrance to the castle storerooms would allow them to come and go and take what they chose even at times when they could not show themselves openly.

"There is a stair here," said the Lady's voice. "Put your free hand on the wall to your left, and stay as close to it as you can."

Kate would have fallen otherwise. The stair was a spiral one, very steep, its stone treads uneven and worn hollow from centuries of use. She had to struggle and fumble for almost every step, lurching on her awkward feet and clinging helplessly to the wall. The spiral swung around and turned and swung around on itself again, coiling down and down, until she felt as if her brains were beginning to turn with it by the time they reached a level place and there was another pause. The air was still very close, but it had become bitterly cold and she thought they must be a long way under the ground. Then there was the faintest possible touch of warmth on her right cheek, as though the Lady had lighted some sort of lamp or a candle.

"Walk slowly now," said the voice. "Keep your head and your shoulders down, or you will hurt yourself. It is all stone here, and the way in is narrow and low."

They went twenty steps and turned sharply to the left; then thirty-four steps and turned right; ninety-five and then left again; a hundred and two —

"A hundred and three, and a hundred and four, left," Kate whispered to herself, hanging desperately to the count. It was at least no worse than the terrible games of blindfold chess her father had once made her play with him, as a way of training her mind and memory. If she could only keep the exact pattern of turns and the number of steps between them clear in her head, there was a chance — a very faint chance — that she might be able to find the way out again to Lord Richard's tower when the time came.

It was her own physical clumsiness that defeated her. Everything was going well when the Lady's voice said: "Take care; there is slime on the path here," and for the next five minutes .she was too occupied with keeping her feet under her to mark the turns or make an accurate count of the steps they had taken. When they got to better ground at last, she was lost.

Once she noticed that the air was growing much warmer and very damp, almost steamy; but she could not tell what had caused the change, and after a while it was cold again. Later still, she began to hear a sound in the distance. At first she thought it was thunder, and then realized that it could not be: they were too far under the ground. It was the roar and crash of water, a cataract or a river in flood, booming and echoing through the depths of a chasm. In the beginning it came from a long way off, but as the path twisted and turned, it drew nearer, rising louder and louder, until she could feel even the wall of the passage quiver with it under her hand.

Then suddenly the wall was gone and they were walking straight into the noise — into it, over it, as though they had come out and were making their way along a ledge or a bridge somewhere high above the chasm, and the pealing echoes were all around them, splitting, shivering, reverberating from rock to rock over the hiss of driven spray and the insufferable clamor of the water plunging down coigns and archways and masses of fallen stone far below. Then, just as suddenly, they seemed to be in a passage again. The rock closed down over her head, brushing against her hair, and the noise from the chasm dwindled and died away behind them like light at the end of a tunnel.

The new passage was straight and very smooth, and grew rapidly higher and wider; in a few minutes she could no longer touch the wall with her free hand or feel the rock pressing down above her. But after the uproar in the chasm its stillness was unnerving. The uproar had at least given Kate some idea of space and location, by which to judge the direction in which they were moving and the distance they had come. Here she had nothing to go by, only her hold on the Lady's cloak and the whisper of the Lady's feet on the path ahead of her.

They went on and on and on, one slow, monotonous step after another, through the smooth unbroken dark.

Kate never knew just how long they went on; it seemed like hours. The dark and the sense of her own blind helplessness became more and more painful. In spite of the constricting bandage around her eyes, she found that she was making frantic efforts to see. "I can't bear any more of this," she thought, "I can't bear it," and then realized that the feet ahead of her had stopped moving and the cloak was being pulled out of her hand.

"You will stay here," said the Lady's voice. "There is a place for you to sleep on the floor behind you."

"Can I take this thing off now?" asked Kate. She plucked at the band of green silk over her eyes. "I want to see."

It was a moment before the Lady answered; and when she did, her voice was soft and very faintly amused, as it had been when she let Kate have her own way in the matter of the cup.

"Do as you please," she said. The next sound was the murmuring rustle of her feet moving away again over the stones.

The strip of silk was too tight for Kate to pull over her head, the knot that tied it too subtle for her clumsy fingers. It was only after a bungling struggle that she finally felt the thing come loose and drop away in her hand.

It did not make the slightest difference. There was no flicker of light anywhere, no faintest outline of wall or roof or door, nothing but the same black darkness, unbroken, impenetrable, and absolute. Somewhere in the distance she could hear water running, a spring? a brook? a little stream of water? — but she could not see. All she could do was stand still, the strip of silk in her hand, gazing blindly and helplessly around her.

Then, out of the darkness, not very far away, there came the last sound in the world that she had expected to hear. It was a comfortable wallowing heave, like the flop of a heavy body turning over, followed by a drowsy contented animal grunt.

Kate straightened up with a jerk, her mind stammering indignantly. Not pigs. She would not, she would not, be sent to sleep with the pigs. It was bad enough to be regarded as a dog or a horse.

And then the absurdity of trying to make fine distinctions of rank between pigs and horses and dogs suddenly struck her, and she found herself grinning wryly in the dark. What did it matter? To the Lady, one beast was probably very much like another.

And furthermore, stable or kennel or sty, she could not go on standing on her feet the rest of the night.

She stooped down and felt cautiously for the floor behind her. The pigs must have something to sleep on, straw or dead leaves perhaps — but there had been no rustle of straw when she had heard the creature turn over; it had sounded more as though it were wallowing in mud. The skin on the tips of her searching fingers began to crawl a little at the thought. Straw or dead leaves she thought she could bear with, but if it came to mud —

She tried to shift back a step, stumbled, and fell forward, her hands sinking to the wrist as they went down into a hideous softness of —

Velvet. Not straw or mud or dead leaves, but velvet. Quilted velvet (as she discovered when she collected her wits enough to kneel and grope over it), a great coverlet of quilted velvet luxuriously lined with fur and spread on a very wide, low couch with a square carved chest at its head. There was a pillow, two pillows, both down; and sheets of some fine stuff that might have been linen, but felt more as if it were silk. The inner coverlets were wool, lighter than feathers to the touch and smelling deliciously of lavender when she dragged the velvet quilt back.

Kate drew a fold of the velvet through her hand, almost unbelievingly. She did not know what to make of it. She had heard the pigs wallowing and grunting in the darkness. Surely she had heard the pigs?

She got to her feet, still holding fast to the velvet, and stood for a moment, listening intently for some further sound. The water was still running in the distance, but the animal noises had stopped. All she could hear was a faint echoing sough like some chance murmur of wind among the stones. She stooped down again and passed her hand over the fine carved surface of the chest at the head of the bed, and the yielding delicacy of the pillows, and the sweetness of the fur. The noises might easily have been a trick of her overwrought nerves misinterpreting an echo; but the bed was unquestionably real: solid, comforting, and warm. And wherever she was, she could not stand up weighing uncertainties and possibilities any longer. Her whole body felt numb with cold and strain, and the chill of the rock floor was cutting through her feet to the bone. She would have to lie down and rest.

Without a candle or a comb or proper nightgear or even a drop of water for washing — she did not dare to try to find the stream in the dark — there was very little she could do to get ready for bed, only say her prayers and slip out of her gown and her shoes. The gown she folded up and laid on the top of the chest, setting the shoes beside it. The prayer she hesitated over a little, and then fell back on the steadying familiarity of her ordinary evening paternoster. She hesitated again for a moment when she came to "Deliver us from evil," but decided in the end not to add anything more to that. "All you'll do nine times out of ten is start trying to teach the Lord His own business," was what her father had said to her once. The redheaded woman's cross she took off and slid under her pillow, to keep the skewed bar from snapping if she flung herself about in the night. In the morning, she thought vaguely, she must try to find something she could twist about the bar to protect it, but not tonight, she could not do any more tonight. She turned her head over on the pillow with a sigh and was almost instantly asleep. She was so weary that she did not even hear another snuffling grunt and then a slow, heavy flop as another body turned over again in the darkness, not very far away.

Chapter IX

The People of the Hill

Kate was awakened by a light shining in her eyes. It was so sharp after the long darkness that for an instant all she could see was a wheeling dazzle of fire. Then, as her sight cleared, she became aware that another girl was standing beside her bed with a branch of lighted candles in her hand.

"Is it morning?" asked Kate drowsily.

The girl stood looking down at her gravely. She was dressed in green like the Lady, and carried herself with the same air of remote, delicate grace.

"We do not go by mornings or evenings here," she said.

Kate blinked and sat up, the room taking shape around her. The candles did not do much to illuminate it even now; but they gave enough light to show that the place had once been a natural cave of some kind, all brownish-gray rock. The floor and the walls had been squared off and hewn smooth; but above the walls the rock was wholly untouched and the low roof hung in great laps and folds and waves and pendulous bulges of stone. It was not high enough to suggest the carved arches of a hall or cathedral; rather, it appeared as if the stone were sagging under the pressure of some enormous weight that might bring it down at any moment. Kate took one look at it and then fixed her eyes on the girl's face again.

"My name is Katherine," she said. "Katherine Sutton."

"Oh?" said the girl, without any particular interest. She stepped back a pace and lifted her branch of candles so that Kate could see beyond her down the length of the cave. "Those are Joan and Betty and Marian," she said.