The Perilous Gard (23 page)

"He may be having a hard time getting to Sir Geoffrey," she pointed out. "With the rivers in flood, and the roads — you said yourself that it might take you over a week, even riding. Randal's on foot."

"Creeping like a snail?" inquired Christopher. "All this while? Kate, it's autumn."

"But I may have been wrong about the leaves," Kate argued imploringly. "I may have been clean out of my head; I may have been having a dream. Or the leaves may be falling early this year, such a cold, ailing summer, it would never surprise me if they were. The time can't be up yet, not possibly. It's too soon."

"How do you know?"

Kate thought of pretending that she had kept a count of the "days" and "nights" they had spent in the Hill; but then he would only ask her what the count was in earthly time, and to that she had no possible answer.

"I don't know," she said.

"Well, then? Who's to say?"

Kate tugged at her braid for a moment in silence.

"Gwenhyfara might," she suggested. "If she begins to talk to me again tomorrow, I could ask her how long — "

"I won't have you sit on your hind legs to beg scraps from Gwenhyfara," Christopher interrupted her.

"We have to find out somehow."

"We'll find out soon enough. What difference would it make if we did know? Licking the time out of Gwenhyfara's hand isn't going to stop it from — oh, curse that bell! Kate, listen. I mean it. I will not have you — "

"O don't be so silly, Christopher!" said Kate, scrambling to her feet. He would certainly be furious with her for disobeying him but as long as he was furious he would at least have something more than horrors to think of — and so would she. What she could not bear were the times when she felt as though she were hiding behind the rocks in the gorge again, watching helplessly as he walked further and further away from her towards the shadow at the mouth of the Holy Well. "We have to find out," she said over her shoulder. "I don't mind Gwenhyfara. You leave her to me."

But the next day Gwenhyfara was in a very unpromising mood — cold, silent, and so pale that Kate, looking at her, wondered if she might not have been having an attack of the weight. There was no rest that morning and no chance to talk. Kate was made to lie down and go through a long stretch of exhausting and complicated exercises at a frantic speed which left her no time to think of anything else. She twisted and turned on the stone of the floor, panting, and the redheaded woman's cross on its chain around her neck twisted and turned with her. At first she was aware of it simply as a hard lump of discomfort, thrusting into her breast. Then suddenly she felt a prick and a little dart of pain at the base of her throat. The weakened bar of the cross had snapped at last, and the jagged end was cutting through the ribbon she had wound about it.

"Keep your head down," said Gwenhyfara. "Stop craning it up."

Kate put her head down, hoping against hope that what was left of the ribbon would hold together. It would never have been a good time for Gwenhyfara to find out that she was wearing a cross made of cold iron, but on this day, of all possible days —

"Turn over and lie flat on your face," said Gwenhyfara. "No — with your arms out. Flat, I tell you."

Kate felt another and a sharper prick at her throat as the cross shifted under the new strain. The worst of the prong must still be covered by the padding; but the padding was not going to hold together much longer.

"Wait," said Gwenhyfara. "Someone is at the door."

That they might be interrupted was a possibility that had not even occurred to Kate, accustomed as she was to the undeviating daily order of the Hill — and at any other time it would have struck her as exceedingly strange. But at that moment she was in no state to wonder. She merely felt like a hunted rabbit seeing an unexpected hole in the bank. Gwenhyfara had risen and slipped out of the room, the door closing behind her. There was a murmur of voices from the passage.

Kate sat up and tore the chain over her head.

The ruined ribbon was still clinging to the crossbar, but so shredded and feathered by the prong that it was clear no more could be done with it. The jagged point would have to be bent back somehow or rubbed smooth on the stone of the floor. But she ought to have thought of that long ago. She ought never to have worn the thing at all. Now —

Now it was too late: the murmur of voices from the passage had stopped; there were feet at the door. She had barely time to pour the chain into one cupped hand and close the other over it, on the last infinitesimal chance that she might still be able to hide it.

Then the door opened, and the Lady came into the room.

"Stay where you are," she said to Kate. "That place will do as well as any."

Kate froze where she sat. She could think of only one reason why the Lady should sweep down on her like this, only one. There had been no anger in the voice — it was not the sort of voice that would ever show anger — but surely somebody must have overheard Kate talking with Christopher in the night and told her of it.

"Gwenhyfara has told me," said the Lady, "that she wishes you to be taught to speak as we do."

Kate gave such an uncontrollable gasp of surprise and relief that the Lady nodded reassuringly.

"You may well be astonished," she said. "But what she asked, I had already determined to give you. That, and more."

"More?"

"You have pleased me," said the Lady, "though that is a thing I never thought to say to any of your kind. You have pleased me. It was not so much that you chose to keep your mind at the beginning, but that you held to it afterwards, when you had seen my land and the burden that it laid on you — and I did not make the seeing easy, or the burden light, for I had to test and be sure of you."

Kate could only stare at her dazedly, and the Lady shook her head, almost as if she too was in some way perplexed by what had happened.

"Even now I do not know how you come to be what you are," she said. "The shape of your mind is new to me. But since you have shown that you can live as we do, then it is fitting that you should live as we do, and not like a beast or a slave any longer. From this time you will be taken from among the mortal women; you will be taught to speak, and allowed to carry light, and to learn herb lore, and to find your way among the signs and the passages."

It was the last promise that brought Kate out of her daze like the clang of a bell. The signs and the passages — the Lady had said that she would be taught to find her way among the signs and the passages. Not walking behind Gwenhyfara, with no chance even to look for those "signs"; not left alone in the dark, when she could not hope to discover them. Once she and Christopher were sure they would not be lost in the dark maze of the Hill, they could do anything — get back to the castle — make off with Cecily before they were missed and traced. For someone who did know the signs and was allowed to carry light —

The Lady's clear voice was speaking again.

"Nor is that all I may give you," she said, "if you prove yourself worthy of more. There are not many of our kind left, and the most part have been scattered to the woods and byways, with few to serve or remember us except as a country woman may tell a tale by the fire or set out a bowl of milk for a luck charm at the door. It is only here in the Elvenwood that we can keep the old shape and order of a circle of power; and even here, the wardens are all departed and we do not live unthreatened any longer. But we are that circle still, and to be the least among us is to be greater than any princess of your kind who is alive on the earth. And what more could you wish for?"

Kate could think of a great many things she wished for more: water meadows, and a manor house, and an orchard of green apples, and at least a month's clear time to get herself and Christopher safe out of the Hill. She could not hope to learn the signs and passages in a day.

"I will not speak more of this now," said the Lady, "for later you will understand me better. It is a hard thing to be a princess, and still harder to be a Queen, as I am; and bodily grace and fair speech and lore are not all that you must learn if you are to be one of us. It will be time enough to talk of more when you have seen the teind paid."

"And when will that be?" Kate ventured, holding her breath for the answer. If they had a month — if they had even a week — The Lady came a step nearer, and stood looking down at her gravely.

"Between twelve and one of the clock tonight," she said. "For this is the day which in your world is called All Hallows' Eve; but in ours, the Feast of the Dead."

Absolute shock has sometimes a curious power of both numbing and clarifying the mind. Kate did not even move. She could tell that she had not moved because she could see her own hands, clear and still and flat like hands in a painting, resting against her knees. The hands were clasped lightly over the weight of the coiled chain, and the brown leather robe fell away under them in stiff motionless folds to the floor. She thought, very slowly and calmly: "Gwenhyfara must have known this morning, and she has had the care of him for a long time now. That was what made her so pale."

"Look at me," said the Lady.

Kate looked up, seeing with that strange concentrated clarity, every line of the beautiful face: the proud mouth, the fine delicate bones, the eyes under the lifted lashes, very dark and deep. It was the same face she had seen gazing at her from the shadowy bank in the forest, by the fire in the evidence room, under the blazing lights in the great cavern. Only the eyes had changed. There was no brilliance in them now, and no mockery. They seemed almost weary, intent and sad — or rather, filled with something that would have been sadness if it was possible to imagine any human sadness so wholy free from the least touch of human misery or human longing or human shame or human compassion or human regret.

"I told you it would be hard," she said. "Do you think it is easy for any of us to see the teind paid? But if the land or the people are weak and in need, how else are they to get power again?"

"Another way."

"There is no other way," said the Lady. "All power comes from life, and when that life is low in the land and the people, they must take it from one who has it, adding his strength to their own, or perish. That is the law which the gods have laid on us; and they themselves cannot alter it. Do not even those of your own faith believe that in the beginning your strength came to you out of a death?"

Kate hesitated. The only answer she could think of seemed wild to the point of blasphemy, but there was no help for it: she would have to put the thing into the only sort of language that the Lady might possibly understand.

"What need is there for another teind, then?" she asked, trying desperately to keep her voice steady. "The time for that has passed by. It was finished and done with when Our Lord paid it freely, to add His strength to our own; and His power is enough for us all."

"I have heard that tale," said the Lady, "and it is not as you say. I will not deny that your Lord paid the teind, nor that it would be good to have had some part in it, for He was a strong man, and born of a race of kings, and His teind must have been a very great one. But that was long ago, long ago in His own time and place. Its strength is spent now. The power has gone out of it."

"It has never gone out of it," Kate answered, her voice beginning to shake as she searched for the right words, because everything might hang on them. "All power comes from life, as you said yourself, but the life that was in Him came from the God who is above all the gods; and that is a life that knows nothing of places and times." She paused, and the Lady said almost sharply: "What more?" She was leaning a little forward, her head bent as if she were trying to hear some unfamiliar sound in the distance.

"I — I mean," Kate stumbled on, "that with us there is time past and time present, and time future, and with your gods perhaps there is time forever; but God in Himself has the whole of it, all times at once. It would be true to say that He came into our world and died here, in a time and a place; but it would also be true to say that in His eternity it is always That Place and That Time — here — and at this moment — and the power He had then, He can give to us now, as much as He did to those who saw and touched Him when He was alive on the earth."

"Do you mean," asked the Lady slowly, "that His power is in you?"  Kate stiffened, the color pouring over her face.

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried in a sort of panic. "That was not what I meant. You must not judge it by me. Christopher is the one who has it."

"There is no thought of that in the Young Lord's mind," said the Lady, "or the Guardian of the Well would have learned it by this time, and so I would know it."

"He does not know it himself."

"That is fools' talk," said the Lady. "How could anyone have a power like that without knowing it?"

"I cannot tell," said Kate. "But he was named for a man who bore the whole weight of Our Lord once, on his own shoulders, and His power was with him, even though he — " her voice suddenly wavered and broke, "he did not know it, either, and thought he was caring for a child."

The Lady drew a long breath. Then she lifted her head at last, and her eyes were shining.

"This is a great thing you have shown me," she said. "For it means that when we take his life tonight, we can take the Other Life also, to add its strength to our own; and that is even more than I thought we could get from him."

It came over Kate in a rush of despair that she might as well be trying to climb the Hill of Glass in the fairy tale. The Lady's mind was completely set in its own conception of "power"; and against that every argument she could raise would simply glance off as if from some impenetrable crystal.

"Go on," commanded the Lady. "Is there nothing more you can tell me'?"

"No," Kate answered dully, sick with defeat. "There is nothing at all. Only — "

"Yes?"

"Will you let me speak to him?"

"He is under silence," said the Lady. "Only the Guardian of the Well may speak to him now. And what would you say to him if you did?"