The Perilous Gard (24 page)

Kate shook her head blindly. She was at the end of her strength, and the unnatural clarity of thought and purpose that had sustained her was falling away into a kind of stupefied exhaustion. "Please," she said. "Let me speak to him."

The Lady slipped the gold bracelet from her wrist and stood turning it meditatively between her hands. "I did not know," she said, "that the Young Lord was so dear to you."

"So dear to me?" Kate stammered. "So — so dear to me?"

"I mean," said the Lady, in her unmoved crystal voice, "do you love him?"

"Yes," said Kate helplessly, watching a little point of fire run around the rim of the bracelet as it caught the flame of the candles from the bracket on the wall behind her. "But why should you care for that?"

"Because of the teind."

"What?"

"Have you no wits?" the Lady demanded. "Or do you think that I am such a fool as to take you there now? You would only be trying to claim him."

"But how could I claim him?" Kate was staring at her dazedly again. "How could I?"

"You know that well enough." For one instant a flash of something that might have been purely human annoyance appeared in the Lady's eyes. "There was a woman of your kind once whose lover taught her the way to do it, and afterwards the tale was made into a ballad called Tam Lin and sung up and down the common road for anyone to hear it."

"I never heard the whole ballad," said Kate. "I don't how she did it."

"Then I will not tell you," said the Lady, "and neither will I be such a fool as to let you see the teind paid now. You could not bear it. The pain and the grief would only break your mind, or turn it utterly against us. That I will not have. It will be long, and very long, before there is another teind, but you must wait until then. In this I can give you no choice. The present teind is not for you. You must put it out of your mind, as if it had never been."

"I cannot put it out of my mind," said Kate despairingly. Her eyes were still on the point of fire caught in the Lady's bracelet.

The Lady began to swing the bracelet very gently to and fro. The point of fire moved in a slow curve from the right to the left of the arc, and back again.

"Why should you not?" she asked, almost in a whisper. The icy crystal hardness had gone out of her voice, and it was like music, very low soothing music. "It will do you no good to remember him. Let him pass from you. All things change and pass in the end, and when they are past we must rest and forget. That too is a law of the gods. When the summer is over, the land must sleep, root and stone and water and earth: the seed in the furrow, the beast in the hole, the leaf on the tree giving itself to the air, lightly — lightly — no weight staying it — to fall to the ground and to rest. To rest and to rest, safe on the ground, deep under the snow, with nothing to trouble it, only to rest."

That was the last Kate heard clearly: the words were all blurring and weaving together, and she was aware of them only as murmuring rhythms swinging to and fro, to and fro, to and fro, like the point of fire in the Lady's hand, rising and falling and rising and falling, weaving together, over and over again, lovely floating sounds, inexpressibly consoling. She could feel the stupefied exhaustion of her mind melting deliciously into softness and warmth, as if down, down into the velvet and fur of a bed. Her lips parted in a long sigh of content and acquiescence. Her head fell forward, swaying on her shoulders. The hands clasped in her lap slumped against her knee, and the jagged prong of the broken crossbar caught the center of her left palm.

It was only a glancing prick, but the little momentary discomfort broke the rhythm of the circling sounds and roused her for an instant out of her lethargy. She thought: "This is a spell. She is trying to put a spell on me," her mind wavering and stumbling against the pull and drag of the music, unable to break loose from it. She felt her brain beginning to go again as the prick faded; the circling sounds shut in about her; and then, with a last effort of will, she closed her hand and brought it down on the jagged prong as hard as she could.

A white-hot flash of pain ripped up her whole arm. The point of fire spun around, dancing crazily; the music shivered into roaring fragments. Then her eyes cleared. She was back on the floor in Gwenhyfara's cell, with the candles burning on the wall behind her; and the point of fire was only the reflection of a flame caught in the rim of the Lady's gold bracelet. One of her hands was throbbing abominably, and a hot stickiness was oozing up through the coils of the redheaded woman's chain into the palm of the other. The Lady's voice was speaking somewhere over her head.

"Rest," she was saying, "rest, and forget. The seed to the furrow, the beast to the hole, the leaf to the ground, and all to rest and forget."

Kate had a sudden furious impulse to rise to her feet and announce that she was not a seed in the furrow or a leaf on the ground; it was as much as she could do to stay where she was, her head drooping, and continue to let her shoulders sway very slightly to the interminable, murmuring chant. "Oh, get on!" she thought, in an agony of impatience. "Get on with it, can't you?"

"Sleep," said the Lady. "I will leave you to sleep now. Lie down, lie down, close your eyes, lie down, lie down, and sleep and forget."

This was a little more promising. Kate closed her eyes obediently, and — the art of falling had been the first that Gwenhyfara had taught her — slid to the floor in an exhausted heap, taking care to end on her left side, with her back to the Lady and her face turned away from her against the stone.

"Sleep!" said the Lady in a wholly different voice: clear and penetrating and imperious. "And do not awake until I return and command it. By seed and beast and leaf, I command you to sleep and when you awake to remember nothing that you know of the Young Lord, Christopher Heron: neither that he paid the teind, nor that he was dear to you, nor that you ever saw him, nor that you and I spoke of him together. All that part of your mind I have taken into my own hand, and it is gone from you. Sleep and forget."

There was an instant's silence, and then the faint rustling stir of her feet coming nearer.

Kate lay still, sickeningly afraid that she was about to bend down and make sure that the spell was working as it should. But apparently it did not occur to the Lady even as a possibility that she might have missed her mark. The feet moved past Kate's inert body and on without pausing; there was a little clink as she lifted the branch of candles off its bracket to light her out of the room. The faint rustling stir retreated slowly and died away.

Kate let the cross drop from her hand with a gasp of relief, and stood up. It was pitch dark, but she knew where she was and long practice had given her a certain ability to find her way blind over any ground that was familiar to her. She paused a moment, picturing the shape of the cell in her mind; then she moved very quickly and lightly across to the door and out into the passage beyond.

She had no time to think or plan. Her one idea was simply to get to Christopher as fast as she could. What she would do if she met the Lady returning, or encountered another troop of the Fairy Folk, she did not know. How he and she were going to make their way out of the Hill without losing themselves, or reach the castle, or find Cecily, she did not know either. All that would have to take its chance now. Any chance was better than none.

She turned into the passage that led to the great cavern, her feet gathering speed. She knew every inch of the way here, every irregularity and change of surface, every step, every fold in the stone. There was nothing to stop her. The Fairy Folk seemed to have withdrawn to some other part of the Hill. The passage was completely silent and felt curiously empty, as though she were running about through the stillness of a deserted house.

The first check came at the two doors halfway down the passage. They had always been closed and locked before whenever she had passed them, but now she could feel that they were open, wide open, drawn back against the wall. And somewhere ahead of her — it was not possible to tell how far away — there was the faintest flicker of light.

Then she realized that the door into the great cavern must be open too, and what she had seen was nothing but the glow of the candles that were always left burning in honor of the Lady on the wall behind the stone chair. The glow vanished as she plunged through the narrow entrance to the last passage and turned to her left.

"Christopher!" she called. "Christopher, we — "

She stopped short, feeling again the silence, the curiously empty quality of the air.

"Christopher?" she said questioningly.

There was no answer.

Chapter XII

All Hallows' Eve

Kate said again: "Christopher!" and took a step forward, groping for the mesh. Her outstretched hands touched something hard in the darkness, and it moved a little, with a faint sighing sound.

The hidden door in the mesh was open: not broken or torn, as if he had forced his way through it and escaped, only open, wide open, like the other doors, drawn back to the wall. It came away loose as she caught at it and hung swinging, clappering gently — almost idly — against the stakes and knots of withy that framed the dark open entrance to the room beyond.

Somewhere in her mind a long-forgotten memory stirred and came back to her — her own six-year-old voice protesting that she was cold, and her nurse's answer, kind but uncompromising: "No, leave the door open, Mistress Katherine. On All Hallows' Eve you should always leave every door in the house open, to let the dead pass through."

After another moment the door stopped moving, and the silence fell again, complete, unbroken, and final. The room beyond the door was empty. She did not even have to go into it to be certain of that.

Presently she turned and began, very slowly, to make her way back towards the outer passage. She was not going anywhere, or thinking of anything. She had nothing left to think of.

There was only one place they would have taken him — back up the gorge of the Holy Well, to the Standing Stone, where the teind had been paid in the old days. She could not get out to him, and she could not "claim" him, like the lady in the ballad; she did not even know how the lady had done it, and she was utterly without help. The old dream of Sir Geoffrey riding down the forest road followed by a long line of heavily armed men was only a dream. It was clear by now that Randal must have failed them, and there was no reckoning on Sir Geoffrey any longer. The castle people were all under Master John's thumb, and too afraid of him to be of any use. The village people might possibly turn against the castle in some last extremity, but at midnight the village people would be asleep in their beds, and there was no way that she could reach them or rouse them. The only part of the Hill where she could find her way blind was along the path that ran from the great cavern to Gwenhyfara's cell. Without light and the signs, even the Lady herself would be lost among the other turns and passages: Gwenhyfara had said so. Kate had never learned the signs, and she had no light. There was no light in the whole Hill except for the candles that the Fairy Folk kept in their own hands, and the —

The - the "Oh, you idiot!" she cried out, and began to run.

The door of the great cavern was still open, and through it, distant and shimmering, came the glow from the four clusters of candles that were always left burning, in honor of the Lady, on the dais wall at the far end, behind the stone chair. She was so accustomed to seeing them there that until that moment she had not given them a thought. She had never even looked at them closely.

She went down the hall and looked at them now, her heart thudding violently but her eyes suddenly clear and as coldly intent as the Lady's own.

There were three candles to a cluster, set in branched holders like the one Gwenhyfara usually carried, and the holders placed on flat sconces that jutted out from the wall. The candles themselves were thick and fairly tall, eight or nine inches high, church candles, the finest wax. They would go on burning for a very long time.

The sconces were set high on the wall, and she had to clamber up on the stone chair — feeling a flash of wicked pleasure at the sacrilege — to lift the nearest branch down. She could not take more than one: the wound in her palm had almost stopped bleeding, but her whole left hand felt numb to the wrist, and she was unable to carry anything except in her right. All she could do was put out two of the three candles to keep them for a reserve supply before she turned to go. The single remaining flame dipped and fluttered dangerously when she started to run again, and she was forced to rein herself down to a walk, pacing like an acolyte in a church procession back up the hall and through the door to the outer passage.

She had no choice in the matter: it would have to be the path that led to the waterfall and out into the glade with the oak tree. There must be other ways out of the Hill — the way by the Holy Well, and the way back to Lord Richard's tower; but she could not tell in what direction to begin looking for either of them. At least she knew where the path to the glade with the oak tree started: at the two closed doors halfway down the outer passage. It was there that she had been cowering when the Fairy Folk overtook her on the dancing night. She remembered the sudden rush of feet, and the clear voices singing, and the torchbearer with his head flung back, thrusting his way past her. Then the rest had come crowding up, and they had all run together through — through — which door had it been? the first, or the second? She had not seen it clearly. Everything had happened too fast, and there had been too many other bodies pressing about her to be sure. But that need not matter. She wanted a passage. With luck, the wrong door would lead only to a sleeping cell or a storeroom.

Her luck was out. The doors were still wide open, pulled back like the others against the wall; but when she stopped at last and raised her light to look, she found that both of them led to passages, narrow tunnels that sloped upward for a few feet and then vanished in darkness. There was nothing whatever to distinguish the first from the second, and Kate could almost hear Christopher's voice saying dryly: "One of their tricks?"