The Perilous Gard (25 page)

She beat off the thought of Christopher and what might be happening to him before it drove her frantic, and turned from the doorways to the doors themselves. She had to push them free of the wall with the point of her foot — for her left hand was past using, and her right taken up with the candle-branch — but in the end she swung them back and made herself stand still and look at them in turn.

One thing at least she was sure of. The Fairy Folk would not have lied to her. They might trick or mock her kind for the sport of the matter, but they would somehow do it by telling the exact truth. If Gwenhyfara or the Lady had said that there were "signs" to mark the passages, then signs there would be.

There were no signs. Both doors unmarked, and as far as she could see, there was nothing to choose between them.

She set her teeth, and relighting the other two candles, looked again.

The first door was made of plain oaken boards, with bronze hinges and a leaf-shaped bronze thumb-latch.

The second door was exactly like it.

No, not exactly.

Somewhere, as the light of the candles swung from one door to the other, she caught something — a flicker, the very faintest possible flicker, of a difference. Not the height, or the breadth, or the timbers, or the hinges, or —

The latch. The pattern of the latch, where it broadened out to make a holding place for the thumb. On one door, it was shaped like an oak leaf. On the other door, it was ivy.

For a long moment, Kate stood still, her head up, hardly breathing, as though the oak leaf thumb-latch might somehow vanish if she moved. It was all coming back to her again, the rush of feet behind her on the dancing night, and the clear voices singing together, question and reply —

O where is the Queen, and where is she now?
  Go out by the oak leaf, with never a though!

and then suddenly her head dropped forward, and she was rocking between fury and exasperated laughter.

It was there before her, the bronze oak leaf that had never hung on a bough, the sign that marked the passage, the key of the Hill. And she had had it in her hand ever since the day that she had sat on her horse beside Sir Geoffrey and heard the same words blowing towards them through the misty rain. Randal must have learned the words on one of the nights when he was allowed to come back and harp for the dancers. It would be like them to teach him that song and then let him go singing the truth, the exact truth, over half the roads in England, since he himself would know nothing of what it meant, and everyone else would take it for a jingle of the lunatic he was. Her mouth hardened fiercely as she thrust back the oak leaf door with her shoulder and walked into the arched tunnel behind it. There were some things she thought that she might forgive the Fairy Folk, but what they had done to Randal was not one of them.

The new passage was neither rough nor treacherous underfoot, like the way from Lord Richard's tower; it had been made for running dancers, and it unwound before her as smoothly as a ball of old Dorothy's embroidery silk. Twice more she came to doors, and once to a cross-passage, but always the sign of the oak leaf was there to guide her, carved in the stone of the wall or worked into an ornament for a hinge or a latch. Presently the air grew fresher; she heard a murmuring splashing sound somewhere ahead, and wondered, with a lift of her heart, if it was the waterfall that masked the rock arch at the end of the passage. The path took a sharp curve to the left, and there suddenly opened out of the darkness the dimmed pearly moonlit glow she remembered. She stooped her shoulders to shield the precious candles from the spray, and was through it so quickly that only one of the flames went out.

The glade lay before her, silent now and empty of dancers, but still drenched in moonlight so brilliant that it broke through even the heavy shadow of the oak tree and showed a motionless dark figure curled up there among the roots. The light was running like silver rain down the strings of the harp that rested against his shoulder.

"Fairy woman," he whispered, "fairy woman, fairy woman, is it a dancing night?"

Kate hardly heard the question. Her mind was so wholly taken up with its one overwhelming concern that she did not even feel any surprise at finding him there.

"What time is it?" she whispered back. There was such a hard knot in her throat that she could barely speak. "Randal, for the love of heaven, tell me what time it is."

"A little past ten," replied Randal obediently.

"
Ten?
"

More than a hour until midnight, almost two: and even one seemed at that moment like time everlasting. Her worst fear, the fear she had not dared to think of, had been that she was already too late. "You did say ten, Randal? Are you sure?"

"The big clock in the courtyard arch was striking ten when I went down the hill from the castle to here, and it's no more than a mile away."

"The castle? You've been at the castle tonight?" Then with an effort Kate remembered that she must keep her voice quiet and easy, not to confuse him. "Is Sir Geoffrey there, Randal? Did you give my letter to Sir Geoffrey?"

"What letter, fairy woman?"

Quiet;
quiet.
"I'm not a fairy woman, Randal," she said quietly. "Don't you remember me? Kate Sutton? Mistress Katherine?"

"Why have you changed yourself into a fairy woman, then?"

"I've not changed, not in myself, Randal. I haven't changed at all. Do try to remember. I gave you a letter for Sir Geoffrey, to put into his own hand. What did you do with it?"

Randal drew back a little. "Sir Geoffrey was angry with me." For the first time since she had met him, he sounded petulant and even sullen. "I did as you told me," he whimpered. "I carried it with me all summer long and never forgot it. You wanted him to come back by All Hallows' Eve. I counted up the days it would take him to ride here, counted them up carefully, to be sure I was doing just as you told me.
By
All Hallows' Eve was what you said."

"Yes," said Kate, dismayed, remembering how she had blundered over the message. "Yes, I did."

"Then why was he angry with me? There was time enough, and more. We rode like the wind, and it was not my fault that he fell over the rope."

"What rope?"

"Someone had stretched a rope across the road in the forest, and it was so dark that the horse couldn't see it." (Master John, thought Kate instantly. The mean little trick to bring down any chance pilgrim or traveler who might try to reach the castle that night did not taste of the Fairy Folk.) "Sir Geoffrey was first in the line, and he fell striking his head. So I left his men trying to recover him, and ran away in the dark. I don't like it," said Randal simply, "when people are angry with me."

"But what became of Sir Geoffrey? Was he hurt? Hurt badly?"

"That's more than I know. I went down to the castle from there, to see if I could get a bit of bread, but they were all asleep, and then the moon made me remember that it might be a dancing night. Is it a dancing night?"

"No, I'm sorry," Kate murmured, her mind trying frantically to grapple with the new problem. A blow on the head could mean anything. Sir Geoffrey might have been stunned for a moment — or an hour. He might not come to himself for days. He might even (face it) be dead. Most certainly she would be a fool to count on his reaching the place in time. With a sigh she thrust the old dream away again. "Randal — " she began.

But Randal's wandering gaze had flitted off to something else. "There's blood on your hand," he announced. "Why is there blood on your hand?"

"I ran a sharp piece of steel into it," said Kate. "Randal, how did the lady claim Tam Lin in the ballad?"

"I can tend the hurt for you," said Randal proudly. "The Fairy Folk showed me how to do it one night when I'd stepped on a rusted nail." He rummaged in the pouch at his belt and brought out a little silk bag containing a jar of ointment and a crescent-shaped knife. These he laid out on a ledge by the waterfall with all the gravity of a child playing doctor to a doll.

Kate bit back a cry of impatience. If she snapped at him or did not let him have his own way he might think she was angry and run from her as he had run from Sir Geoffrey. "It's no great matter," she said. "My hand can wait."

Randal took the hand and frowned over it professionally by the light of the candles. "No," he said, "for this is the kind that festers the soonest if you let it close up on you. Hold still now," and bending back her fingers, he cut the wound open with two quick slashes, one across the other, and then told her to hold it under the running water of the fall to let it bleed out. The water was icy cold and numbing to the pain; after a moment Kate took a deep breath and asked for the second time:

"Randal, how did the lady claim Tam Lin in the ballad?"

Randal shook his head. "
Tam Lin's
not a song to sing so near the Queen's hall," he said reproachfully. "I told you that long ago, on the rock by the little stone house."

"You don't have to sing it to me," Kate implored him. "Only tell me what she did. Whisper if you like. Then nobody can hear us. Please, Randal. What did she
do?
"

Randal opened the jar of ointment and bent to salve Kate's hand, his head very close to hers. "Tam Lin told the lady to pull him down from the white horse and then hold fast to him," he answered hurriedly, under his breath. "A terrible hard thing to do."

"Is it so hard to pull a man down from a horse?" asked Kate, taken aback.

"Not if he wants to come. But then the Fairy Folk laid a spell on him to make her let him go."

"What spell?"

Randal's voice dropped even lower. "They changed his shape in her arms," he whispered. "Some say to a cold snake, and some to a burning fire, and some to a great bird, and some to all of them in turn; but still she held him fast, so in the end he came back to his own true shape and knew her face, and then the Fairy Folk had to set them free."

Kate's first impulse was to dismiss the tale of the shape-changing as an invention of the ballad maker's; however, she had seen enough of the Lady's magic by now to feel sure it was at least based on a distorted account of something that had actually occurred. But — she told herself firmly — the poor lady in the ballad had not known that the Fairy Folk's magic was nothing but medicine or illusion, and she had been all alone. There was still one place where Kate could hope to find help.

"Randal," she said, "how do I get to the village from here?"

Randal had produced a roll of linen strips from his bag and was busily bandaging her hand. "You follow the little stream from the waterfall out of the forest until it runs into the river, and the river into the open land," he told her. "And put your candles out, or you'll have the woods on fire. I myself will come with you, to show you the way."

The bank of the little stream was very dark under the shadow of the interlaced branches, but beyond the forest the open vale with its scattering of trees looked almost day-clear. The moon, now completely full and even more glorious than it had been on the dancing night, was riding up the heavens through a whole attendance of stars, so bright that Kate could only hope fervently that nobody on the Hill was watching for strays on the road. With its crest of battlemented walls and towers shouldering the sky, the great mass of the Hill looked much larger than it usually did, larger than she remembered it, larger and more formidable the closer they came.

A light was burning in the gateway above them.

"Randal."

"Yes, Mistress Katherine?"

"Could a heavy man — or call it a line of heavy men, one at a time — get into the castle by your secret way over the wall behind the stables?"

"That's no way for a heavy man, Mistress Katherine. Only the cat or I could climb the stable roof."

They plodded on. Kate tried to quicken her pace a little, but the effort did nothing but show her how dangerously weary she was, too weary to move fast, and the slow walk down the long bright road seemed to go on forever. Somewhere along the way Randal had put a supporting hand under her arm, but she could not remember when he had done it. The castle kept growing larger and larger.

"Mistress Katherine."

"Yes, Randal?"

"Why don't you go up there, and not to the village?" Randal pointed to the light in the gateway. "Up there is where you belong."

"I want to go the village first."

"No, you don't. The village people are afraid of the castle folk. A little village boy threw a stone at me once."

"They won't throw stones now. I've friends in the village," said Kate, "and they'll know me."

"That they will not." Randal was certain. "
I
knew you'd changed into a fairy woman because of the way you carried yourself, but when they see you in the light, they'll take you for a bogle out of the woodlands and shut their doors in your face."

"But — " Kate began, and then hesitated. It had not until that moment occurred to her to think how she would look: blood-stained, disheveled, grotesquely hung about with animal skins, and shrilling at the doorsill on the Feast of the Dead.

"I can tell them who I am," she argued. "They'll believe me then. I'm sure they'll believe me."

"Not they. The air's full of ghosts and evil things walking the earth on All Hallows' Eve. You can beat on their doors and tell them who you are till it's morning, and nobody will listen to you."

"They
must
listen. I want the men to go up to the castle with me."

"The men from the village?" Randal turned at the foot of the path up the Hill to stare at her as if she were demented. "Up to the castle? On All Hallows' Eve?"

"They must go with me, Randal. They must, I tell you. We'll have to break down the gate. There's no other way to get in."

"Why don't you just walk in at the gate?" suggested Randal diffidently.

Kate's hard-held patience broke at last. "Because the porter locks and bars it the minute the sun goes down," she snapped at him.

"Not on All Hallows' Eve," Randal protested. "On All Hallows' Eve they leave every door in the house open, to let the dead pass through."