The Perilous Gard (20 page)

"It is like that, isn't it?" he choked. "I never thought of it before."

"I wasn't trying to jeer at you," Kate protested, horrified at what she had done.

"I know you weren't, sweetheart," said Christopher. "But when it comes to the day of judgment, I only hope I can get somewhere near you in the crowd."

"Why?"

"I want to know how you'll describe the proceedings."

"That isn't the point." Kate was in no mood to laugh, and she did not see that there was anything to laugh at. "They are using you abominably."

"They don't see it as the goose would." Christopher was still laughing. "Didn't I tell you they were using me like a King of the land in the old days? Though why anyone should have
wanted
to be a King of the land in the old days I cannot conceive."

"Christopher."

"Yes?"

"Will you tell me one thing? I wouldn't ask you, only — I — it's worse in a way. Not knowing."

There was a moment's pause. Then Christopher said:

"What is it?"

"Did they say how they were going to do it — on All Hallows' Eve?"

"Up at the Standing Stone. You remember, that big rock on the path to the Holy Well? That's where it was always done in the old days. They use the ashes afterwards for spells and charms. It's one of their four great yearly festivals. The other three — "

"Ashes?" Kate interrupted him sharply. "What ashes?"

"From the burning."

"
What
burning?"

"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw. The chaplain didn't like us to do it, but it was a very old custom and he was never able to stop us. We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."

There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not — not — made out of — "

"Randal must be well on his way to Geoffrey by this time," said Christopher. "Keep that clearly in your mind, will you? And as for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it at school. It's in Caesar somewhere."

"But that — " said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."

"What's sixteen hundred years to them? There must be ice lying in some northern caves that's older yet — and why should it ever melt as long as it keeps to a cold hidden place where the sun can't reach it? They don't have to go by our time here, Kate. They can go by a time of their own, as the ice does."

From somewhere in the distance there came a sharp silvery sound, like a bell striking once. It was followed, almost instantly, by a dull rumbling roar that rushed along the outer passage and then died away. Kate rose to her knees, startled. "What's that?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Christopher. "If we were at home in Norfolk, I'd say someone was sending water over a spillway to ease the pressure on a dam, but down here God alone knows what it may be. The Guardian won't tell me. It does sound like the roaring of the sea, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Kate.

"I hear it every night. Afterwards, they're always quiet for a little longer, and then I begin to see the lights moving back and forth again. You'd best go now, Kate. They mustn't find you running about where you have no business to be."

Kate scrambled to her feet.

"I can come tomorrow," she said.

"What's the risk to you?"

"You're a fine one to talk of taking risks," Kate retorted. "And anyway, there's no risk. I can come easily. Every night, if you want me."

"Men dying of thirst have often been known to want a drink of water," said Christopher. "Very well, then. Get back safe to your bed, Kate, and rest well."

Kate got back safe to her bed, but she did not rest well. It was a long time before she slept at all, and when she did, the sleep was broken and restless, filled with confused dreams of bird shapes rising and falling through circles of flame. The next morning she could not seem to take her eyes away from the lighted candles ranged against the wall behind the Lady's stone chair, or the lighted candles circling around the cavern as the Fairy Folk entered it. Watching the beautiful procession sweep in and then out was ordinarily the only pleasure of her day; but on this particular day, she was unable to see anything clearly except the little points of flame streaming up from the blazing wicks to lose themselves in the shadows cast by the rock overhead.

She was standing in her usual place at the door when the Lady finally came down the hall, the two youths with their branches of candles before her, the People of the Hill forming in order behind. The points of fire lifted and wheeled like birds in flight and began, very slowly, to move forward.

Kate stood watching the long burning line come down on her, one flame after another, all burning — the word went tearing through her brain like a scream: burning, burning, burning, burning — and then suddenly the points of fire blurred and ran staggeringly together, and with a cry she lurched back against the wall in such a blind rush of suffocated horror as she had until now felt only during her worst attacks of the weight.

"Not here, you fool!" she thought frantically, as another wave of thundering darkness broke over her and went by. "Not
here!
" She would have to stay on her feet at least until the Lady had gone by; she would have to. The mist was beginning to clear from her eyes. She drew a deep shivering breath and forced herself to look up.

The Lady was standing within a yard of her, very erect and still, the two youths on either side lifting their branches of candles to let the lights fall on Kate's face.

"Why have you broken the order of my hall with this confusion?" said the Lady. Kate did not answer. It was as much as she could do to hang where she was, limp as a scarecrow, propped against the wall.

"Can you hear what I say?"

Kate nodded.

"Then listen to me," said the Lady. "I have told you before, and I tell you now again, that it is not given to your kind to live as we do. Why should you torment yourself to no purpose? With the Young Lord I can understand it, for he is not in the common run of men, and he would have been a King of the land in the old days. But you I do not understand. He has only a short time of pain to endure, and by enduring it he will give power to many and save the child that is dear to him. But your time will not be short, and you will get nothing from it. You cannot hope to escape, for without light and the signs not even we can find our way among the passages of the Hill; and you cannot hope to be rescued, for I tell you plainly that if Geoffrey Heron or any mortal man comes into this place to take it by force, I will destroy you and every other prisoner I hold before I will give them up to him. All you can look for — the rest of your days — is to serve and to drudge, to scrub stone on your knees, to live like a beast, to toil and be weary and in the end to die. Is not that the truth of the matter?"

"It may be," said Kate.

"It is," said the Lady. "But the knowledge of truth is only a shape in the mind, and that much I can change to ease you. You have borne it already longer than I thought it was possible that you could; and there would be no shame in your asking me to take it away from you now, nothing but wisdom, to lay down a load that is too great for you to carry. And so: answer my question. Why did you do what you did?"

Kate looked from the inexorable face to the blazing lights, and back again.

"I slipped," she said. Even in her own ears this did not sound particularly convincing, but it was the best she could do. "I caught my heel and slipped and I fell against the wall."

The Lady merely lifted her hand and glanced down at the empty palm as if she were waiting for something to be put into it.

"I — I'm very clumsy," Kate stammered desperately. "You know how it is with me. You spoke of it yourself, and it's true."

The Lady closed her hand and dropped it.

"With my kind it is a matter of pride always to speak the truth," she observed calmly. "The most that can be said for your kind is that they will sometimes tell a good lie instead of a bad one. But let that pass. I will take what you have said to me. You are not in pain, you need no easing, you stumbled in your clumsiness, and you fell against the wall. Is that as you would have it?"

"Yes," said Kate thankfully.

"Very well," said the Lady. "But I think you would have been wiser if you had told me it was only the weight."

It would have been wiser: Kate knew that before the Lady had even done speaking. The Fairy Folk might have forgiven her for a fleeting attack of the weight — anybody, even the Folk themselves, could have a fleeting attack of the weight. Habitual bungling awkwardness would seem by far the greater offence to them.

"I couldn't help myself," was all she could say.

"And is that a good reason why the order of my hall should be broken by your clumsiness?"

"No," said Kate, adding despairingly: "I only meant that I would help it if I could."

"There are ways of doing that," said the Lady. "Have you ever looked well at the mortal women we keep here in the Hill?"

A quick cold stab of terror went through Kate's heart like ice, but there was nothing she could do except answer, and only one answer she could give.

"Yes," she said.

"Would they be clumsy if they were left to themselves?"

"Yes."

"But are they clumsy now?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Kate's eyes went helplessly to the Lady's right hand. It was empty but she could see the golden cup in it as clearly as if she were already crouching on the steps of the dais, waiting her turn along with Joan and Betty and Marian. "Because of what you gave them," she said.

"Then can you think of one way that I might rid you of your clumsiness, since you wish it so much?"

"Yes," said Kate. There was nothing else she could say.

"And if you were in my place," asked the Lady softly, "would you take that one way to do it?"

Kate lifted her head. She was sick of being run up and down for the Lady's entertainment like the last forlorn piece on a chessboard.

"Yes," she replied deliberately. "In your place I think it very likely that I should."

The Lady stood for a moment regarding her with a smile so faint that it could hardly even be called malicious.

"You must learn to attend more carefully to what I say to you," she observed at last. "I said: one way, not that it was the only one. Gwenhyfara!"

"Madam?"

"Take this clumsy girl somewhere out of my sight and teach her to move as our kind are taught to do."

"Gwenhyfara's going to teach me how to move," said Kate.

"Is she?" asked Christopher; and then, after a pause, "Why? What's the matter with the way you move now?"

"The Lady doesn't like it," Kate answered vaguely, thinking not of Christopher's question, but of his voice when he asked it. She had not talked with him very often, and when she did, her mind was taken up with other concerns, but surely his voice as she remembered it had never been so — so — what was the word she wanted? Lifeless? Colorless? Empty? Remote? It sounded almost frighteningly like her grandfather's during his last illness, when he was so far gone that it was only by a great effort of will that he could attend to what was said to him, or even hear what was said.

"Christopher — " she began tentatively, wondering what the gray creature had done to him while she had been away. Certainly it had done something.

"Christopher," she began again and then broke off, drawing back a little as she had drawn back the night she had come upon him praying in the darkness.

"Yes?" said Christopher. "What is it?"

"Nothing," said Kate, wishing passionately — not for the first time — that she were only somebody else. Her father, with his wisdom, would have known what to say: the right words to comfort and hearten him; or Master Roger, with his calm authority; or the Lady Elizabeth, with her royal spirit. She even had a momentary vision of Alicia, laying her velvet cheek against the mesh and crying: "O Christopher! how dreadful it must be for you! O I wish I could help you! Truly I do!" But when she thought of herself, all she could see was herself, Kate Sutton, that first day up at the Holy Well, making stupid demands, pelting him with questions and arguments, rummaging with her great clumsy hands through his pride and his grief and his dignity until he had finally ordered her off, because — she remembered exactly how he had put it — he could not otherwise end a stupid and profitless conversation. Stupid. Profitless. Enough to drive any man mad.

"You're not talking," said Christopher. "Go on talking."

"What do you want me to talk of?" asked Kate helplessly.

"I don't care," said Christopher. "Whatever you like. Anything. Only talk." Kate cast wildly around in her mind for the "anything," wishing more than ever that it was her father who was sitting there, her father or Master Roger or the Lady Elizabeth or Alicia. Surely that was the least God could have done for him, the very least.

"Christopher," she blurted out, "do you ever think about food?"

"Food?" The heartbreaking control of the voice flickered a little, as if in surprise, and the next question was a real one. "What do you mean?"

"J-j-just food," Kate stammered. "Things to eat. I mean, they don't feed the mortal women on boiled grain and milk, like you, but with us it's always meat in wine and spices, every single day, richer than Christmas, and I'm so tired of it. I keep thinking all the time what it would be like to have a loaf of bread, a new loaf out of the oven, with the crust on it, and clotted cream and strawberries."

"I might have known that would be what you'd think of," said Christopher.

"Well, it's better than thinking about nothing," Kate retorted defensively.