The Perilous Gard (17 page)

Set at intervals along the wall were three more couches like Kate's own, each with its carved chest at the head of its coverlet of velvet, brownish-gray velvet, the same color as the rock. Out from under the coverlets shadowy figures were crawling. In the uncertain light she could just make out one of them rummaging vaguely for the lid of her chest, another stooping to shake down her long fair hair. First one and then another began to utter sleepy grunts of complaint as the chill of the air struck them, murmurs and squeals that even now sounded extraordinarily like the snorting of animals. Kate drew back. "Who are they?" she asked sharply.

"The mortal women that we keep in the Hill," said the girl. "Did not the Lady tell you?"

"Yes, but — " Kate hesitated. "Do they always make noises like that?"

"No," said the girl. "They will be peaceful and content as soon as they have seen the Lady and are fed and warm again." She set her branch of candles on a ledge in the wall and stooped to pick up Kate's dress, fingering it with a dissatisfied shake of her head. "You cannot wear that here," she said. "This place is too cold for your kind. Put it away. I will give you another." And opening the chest, she drew out a dark folded garment and laid it at the foot of the couch.

"You will find the belt and your other gear in the chest also," she said. "Dress yourself now, and be ready to come when I call you. What did you say your name was?"

"Katherine," Kate repeated. "What is yours?"

"Mine?" The girl straightened up, her brows lifting very slightly. For some reason, she seemed to be surprised and even offended by the question.

Kate flushed, and straightened up in her turn. She had told the girl her own name; it was only right that there should be a proper return of the courtesy. "Yes," she said. "Your name."

"We do not tell our names to your kind."

"But what am I to call you, then?"

"You may call me Gwenhyfara, if you choose," said the girl. "That name will do as well as any." She walked away to the arched entrance of the cave and stood there, waiting. "Dress yourself," she said over her shoulder.

The dress she had left at the foot of the couch was a long straight robe with wide sleeves. The fair-haired woman by the next bed was huddling into one too, and so was the fat dark woman just beyond her. The robe was made of what appeared to be cured deerskin or some other kind of animal hide, but it was sumptuously lined with fur like the coverlets, and the broad leather belt which went with it was clasped and studded with gold.

There was nothing else in the chest except a pile of clean linen towels and a bag of oddments: hair-ribbons, tooth-cloths, sponges, a ball of fine Spanish soap, and a comb. The back of the cave, beyond the last bed, had been fitted up as a sort of washing place, and the other women were clustering about it. A jet of water, like a fountain spray, spurted from a crack in the wall, fell into a stone basin, and then poured down into a deep drain that ran across the floor under a stone close-stool, to carry the waste away. It was all very clean — as clean as Kate's own garderobe at Elvenwood Hall — but there was no more privacy or dignity than there would have been in a stable. Apart from the fact that the mortal women appeared to be still capable of washing and grooming themselves, it seemed to Kate — jostled about as she waited for her turn at the drain and the water — that "stable" was exactly the right word for the place.

When they had all dressed, braiding their hair in plaits down their backs and pulling one towel through their belts at the waist, Gwenhyfara rounded them up and led them single file through the archway out into a passage. She went first to light the path, Kate after her, and the others trotting behind them like a string of packponies. The passage was the same one down which the Lady had brought Kate the night before — she recognized the smooth feel of the stones underfoot — but in a few moments they turned off it and began to make their way along another passage, much rougher and with an occasional step here and there, always a step up. Presently they went by two doors on the right, both closed; and then a narrow dark opening to the left, apparently the entrance to still another passage. Just beyond it, on the same side, was a third door, through which came light and the sound of voices; and beyond that, at the end, closing the passage, one last door, so low that Kate had to stoop her head as she went through it.

When she lifted her eyes again, her first confused impression was only of height and space; then Gwenhyfara took nine steps forward — slow, ceremonial steps — drew herself erect, and stood still.

They had come out into a cavern, a huge shadowy place like a great hall. At the far end, set on a dais three steps above the level of the floor, was a stone chair with a high, leaf-shaped back. The Lady was sitting in this chair, so quiet that she looked as though she also were made of stone, a gold cup in her hand and clusters of candles burning on the wall behind her. The wall appeared to be one sheet of ore, threaded with crystal or spar that shone in the light, points of green and blue fire darting and flickering over the rock like the play of colors in an opal.

The rest of the cavern was nearly dark and almost entirely bare. Kate could just make out another door in the back wall to her left, matching the door on her right through which they had entered; but apart from that there was nothing to be seen except a sort of ledge like a bench running all the way around the cavern from one end of the dais to the other — and even this might easily have been nothing but the natural formation of the rock.

Then, suddenly, she was pushed aside and the place was full of sound and movement. The mortal women had broken out of line and all three of them were running towards the Lady in an excited pack, with whimpering cries of supplication and joy. She uttered a sharp command and they fell away, two crouching on the steps of the dais while the third crept up and knelt beside the stone chair.

The Lady held her gold cup to the lips of the kneeling woman for a moment, and then, looking into her eyes, began to speak, though Kate was too far away to hear what she said. Presently the woman rose and came back down the hall, gracefully now, with a curiously light, feathery step that made her seem almost to be floating. She went by Kate, smiling at her blissfully as she passed, and sank down in back of her on the bench-ledge against the wall. One by one, the second woman and the third were in their turn called to the dais, given the cup to sip, and sent drifting across the cavern to join the others.

When she had done with all three, the Lady bent forward in her chair and sat for a long moment gazing down the length of the hall in silence. Kate drew a little further back into the shadows behind Gwenhyfara. At that distance, she could not see the Lady's face very clearly, but she had an uneasy feeling that the Lady could see hers and was deliberating over what she saw. Then the gaze was withdrawn. The Lady nodded; Gwenhyfara ran to the dais, took the cup from her hand, and bore it ceremonially off through the door in the wall to Kate's left.

As she disappeared, there was a murmur of steps and voices; and a line of slender, green-clad figures carrying lights began to file into the cavern from the other door to her right. Kate, still standing where Gwenhyfara had left her, was directly in their way; she had only just time to get to a place on the back bench-ledge alongside Joan and Betty and Marian before they came sweeping past.

Thirteen women, in long green gowns and cloaks like the Lady and Gwenhyfara. And after them, thirteen men in short green tunics, with bare feet and garlands of oak leaves on their heads. Kate, who was not really warm even under the thick fur-lined robe, shivered as she looked at them, wondering how they could endure the cold. The gray creature she had seen at the mouth of the Holy Well was not among them, and neither was Christopher Heron. Both men and women had dark hair and very pale, exquisitely cut faces: severe, remote, and as quiet as stone.

They circled around the cavern one by one in a beautiful curving line — all their movements were beautiful — and finally came to rest ranged in two exactly spaced rows down the walls along the whole length of the room. When the last to enter had taken his place, they turned before they seated themselves and all together lifted their candles to look first at the single motionless figure erect in the stone chair at the head of the hall, and then down at the huddle of mortal women slumped on the bench-ledge at the foot.

Joan and Betty and Marian did not appear to know that anything was happening. They went on sitting in the sudden glare as if lost in some happy dream, each staring straight ahead of her, and each of them smiling, three identical smiles.

Then the lights were lowered; the People of the Hill swung about and sat down in two long lines facing one another. At the same moment, Gwenhyfara returned through the left-hand door, this time together with a young man of her own age, she carrying a small wooden spoon and a round wooden bowl full of something hot that steamed and smoked on the cold air, he an ox's horn hollowed and polished into a kind of primitive cup. They paused side by side as they entered, so close to Kate that she could see the horn contained only clear water, and the bowl only a handful of boiled grain, like a frumenty, sodden with milk and a little honey. These they bore up the cavern and offered to the Lady; and behind them followed a second couple, much younger, and finally four children, two boys and two girls, all similarly laden. They went to and fro, up the hall and down again, out the left-hand door and in again, between the lines of seated figures, serving them in order, a horn and a bowl to each.

Nobody spoke. The seated figures were too far apart to talk to one another, spaced out very widely along the walls, as if to fill room that had once been taken up by a much larger assembly. The young people waited on them in grave silence, coming and going with ceremonial dignity, even the children, though the two youngest were hardly more than babies and, in Kate's opinion, should not have been out of their beds at that hour of the night. — Or was it night? The word had slipped almost unconsciously off the tip of her mind because the shadows and the candles made the place look so much like a lighted hall at evening; but how did she know? The place would look the same no matter when she saw it. For all she could tell, it might really be noon, or only a few hours after sunrise. She did not know how long she had slept, except that it must have been a considerable time. She was no longer exhausted. She was also beginning to feel ravenously hungry.

Her eyes went to the last of the wooden bowls as they were carried past her, wondering whether she and the other mortal women would be allowed a share after the People of the Hill had done with it. Boiled grain with a spoonful of milk and honey on it was not her notion of what to eat for dinner; still, even boiled grain would be better than nothing at all.

When all the men and women had been served, the two youths and the two maidens gathered in the center of the floor, facing the Lady. One of the youths took out a reed pipe like a shepherd's flute and started to play, a thin, crystal air that seemed to come from a long way off. The four children went back through the left-hand door and returned carrying four more bowls which they set down on the floor in front of Joan and Betty and Marian and Kate. These bowls were about the same size as the wooden ones, but were made of beaten gold, very heavy, and had silver spoons and handles shaped like animal heads: geese and asses and swine. They were heaped almost to overflowing with fragments of some rich dark meat in a sauce that smelt delectably of wine and sweet herbs.

Joan and Betty and Marian roused up at the sight of the food. They flung themselves on the bowls with little cries of delight, tossing away the spoons, snatching, gobbling, slavering as they tore at the meat with their fingers and stuffed great chunks of it into their mouths. The four children stood looking at them. They did not point or whisper or nudge one another, only stood there looking, gravely and dispassionately, as though at some page in a book that they had been told to learn by heart.

Kate felt she could have borne it better if she had only been able to think that they were deliberately trying to insult her; but clearly they were not. She glanced away from the mortal women to the line of austere, delicate figures seated on either side of the cavern, and a furious wave of color began to flood over her face. Then she picked up her silver spoon and began to eat: slowly and with attention to her manners. There was no sense letting good food go to waste; that was what her father had always said to her.

The music ended; the horns and dishes were ceremonially carried away. The People of the Hill rose and stood in silence while the Lady went out of the hall, the two youths carrying branches of candles before her. The men remained motionless, standing erect, but as she passed the women sank down to the floor, one hand lifted and the other laid across their breasts, in a sweeping, magnificent bow. They held it flawlessly until she had disappeared through the doorway; then they rose again as lightly as leaves in the wind and followed her out. The men went next, and last of all the children. Only Gwenhyfara and the second girl were left in the cavern with Kate and Joan and Betty and Marian.

The second girl rounded up the three women and took them off by the door to the right. Gwenhyfara beckoned to Kate and led the way back through the one on the left, into the room beyond.

This was a large chamber in the form of an L, with the door at the end of the long stroke and another door at the end of the short one. It was evidently the place where the food had been dished and prepared, though anything less like the kitchens or buttery in her father's house Kate could hardly imagine. There was no fireplace, no proper salting trough or log box or chopping block, no pots or cleavers or spits hung up on hooks, no baskets for vegetables or poultry, no hams or strings of onions dangling from rafters, no stir or bustle or smoke or confusion, no pages or kittens running about underfoot. Here everything was fastidiously ordered and very bare. In the longer arm of the room were two charcoal braziers that held burnished copper pots; and opposite them, a fountain of hot bluish water gushing from the wall into a wide carved basin of stone. In the shorter arm of the room, the used horns and bowls had been set in careful rows down a stone table, the four golden ones at the far end, some distance from the rest. Underneath the table was a rack carrying a line of swabs and copper basins.