The Perilous Gard (26 page)

"Oh, Randal!" gasped Kate. It was true, of course; she ought to have known it would be true, only she had forgotten again. "Randal, I — but what of the porter? The porter's there. He'll be keeping a watch on it."

"The porter's asleep. He won't wake when you pass him. Sir Geoffrey's whole troop of armed men could ride straight in, the horses galloping, and there'd still be no waking him. He's too fast asleep."

"What do you mean, there'll be no waking him? Is he drunk?"

"No. He's asleep, I tell you. They're all asleep up there. Every door in the house is open, and they're all asleep by the hearth, every single one of them, like the enchanted folk in a tale my grandmother told me. You come and I'll show you." He tugged at her sleeve.

Still Kate held back. Randal's account of the sleeping castle did sound very much like a tale his grandmother had told him. Perhaps the tale had come back to his crazy mind because he had seen the porter dozing, or a couple of kitchen maids nodding by the fire. Perhaps it might be wiser at least to try the village first.

Beside her Randal's voice said suddenly:

"What's that?"

A crimson glow like a return of the sunset had appeared in the western sky. It pulsed for a moment above the battlements, and then rose higher and brighter, throwing the walls and roofs and turrets forward into darkness. It came from the far side of Lord Richard's tower. "Somebody's lighted a fire up there," said Randal, mildly surprised. "I thought they were all asleep."

But Kate was no longer listening. He might have mistaken the time from the first, or the slow walk from the forest might have taken even longer than she had thought: it did not matter. All that mattered was that the time had gone by; there could be no weighing of the chances any longer. In one last rush of strength she had not known that she possessed, she snatched her sleeve from Randal's hand and went flying up the path to the gate.

The gate was open and the porter was sprawled out on the bench by the door of his hutch, breathing heavily, his empty supper bowl and tankard next to his hand and his great rawboned dog curled at his feet. The man's breathing changed to a gurgling snore as Kate ran past him. The dog did not even stir in its sleep.

Beyond the gate, the bailey court lay empty and so still that she could hear the laborious ticking from the castle clock in its place on the wall above the archway to the inner court. The numerals and hands of the clock were elaborately gilded, and shone bravely under the red glowing light in the sky.

The shorter hand pointed to eleven, the longer one to six. At the next tick, there came first the whirring sound and then the loud clanging two strokes that marked the half-hour.

Kate's breath caught in her throat, a little whimpering sob. It was not twelve of the clock yet. What she had seen was only the first lighting of the fire.

Randal had taken the porter by the shoulder and was shaking him, but his head only fell forward and flopped from side to side like a rag puppet's. "I told you there'd be no waking them," he observed with calm satisfaction. "You see now how it is with him?"

"Yes," said Kate. "I see now." Fool, fool, not to have seen it as soon as Randal spoke of the enchanted sleep. Master John himself had said that only one or two of the castle people knew about the teind-paying. Why should he risk being found out by any of the others, when all he had to do was ask the Lady for a sleeping drench, and then give the household a barrel of good ale to be merry with, because it was All Hallows' Eve? They would wake in the morning, when the night was over and nobody the wiser. She thought of the empty tankard by the porter's hand. That would be Master John's doing, the miserable little sneak-cup. The man had been drugged to keep him quiet, and so had all the rest of them, by the sound of it.

"The rest of them are in the great hall by the fire," said Randal, running ahead of her up the terrace steps.

There they lay, gathered around the hearth of the great hall, the pages in one heap like a basket of kittens; Humphrey with a chambermaid's head against his shoulder; the cook holding a pan of apples, two of them peeled and the knife on the floor beside him just as it had slipped from his hand. In the place of honor, Sir Geoffrey's own armchair, close to the glowing embers, old Dorothy sat sleeping, with a child on her knee.

"Look!" said Randal, pleased. "That's the little yellow-haired girl who gave me the slipper on the dancing night."

Kate, with one foot already on the first step of the stair leading to the upper floor and the battlement walk, paused and looked back. Somewhere at the back of her mind she could still feel fear, and great pain, and a dreadful dragging weariness, but in her extremity she was hardly aware of them. The same unnatural clarity of thought and purpose she had felt once before in Gwenhyfara's cell had come back to her.

"Randal," she said.

"Yes, Mistress Katherine."

"Would you like to know how you can please Sir Geoffrey again?"

"Sir Geoffrey's angry with me," said Randal.

"But he won't be angry any longer, not if you do just as I say. Take the little yellow-haired girl in your arms and carry her down to the trees by the road at the foot of the castle hill. Can you hide?"

"The Queen of the Fairies herself couldn't find me if I chose to hide from her," said Randal.

"Then hide the child and yourself near the road; and when Sir Geoffrey comes — " she caught herself on the edge of another disastrous mistake, and added hastily, "Sir Geoffrey
or any
of his own armed men,
give her to them and tell them to come straight out to the Standing Stone where the fire is. They'll be pleased with you then, very pleased. I promise you," and with a reassuring nod, she turned and ran on up the stairs.

That last race through the silent house went past like a dream. Nothing of it remained in her mind afterward but a row of doors standing open, and a glimpse of moonlight pouring in at the oriel windows of the long gallery and lying in lattices on the polished floor. Then the night air was cool against her face again, and she was out on the battlement walk that went along the top of the outer wall, pelting along the narrow way, past Lord Richard's tower, making for the steps that led down to the little circular courtyard with the archway out to the Standing Stone. From the wall above the archway she could see anything in the hidden valley just below if she had light enough. And there was certainly light enough. The glow in the sky was all around her as she dropped to her knees to get under the shelter of the parapet, and crept forward to look.

On the wide flat stretch of ground that lay between the Standing Stone and the castle wall an enormous fire was burning. It had evidently been soaked with sweet oils and spices before it was kindled, for it was already flaming sky high, and the air blowing toward her was full of a fragrance like church incense, but somehow different, shriller in the nostrils, sharp and wild and strange. Two dark forms, stable grooms by the look of them, were moving about tending the fire, and a little apart, standing quietly, his hands linked behind his back, one small fat figure with the gleam of a steward's chain around his neck.

The fire was so brilliant that when Kate turned her eyes away and tried to glance past it to the valley, she could at first see nothing at all. Then little by little, the tops of the cliffs appeared, shimmering faintly in the moonlight above the dense shadows that hid the deep floor of the gorge. From the shadows, rising and falling through the perfumed wind and the hiss of the flames, she heard the sound of voices in the distance. They were singing together, a slow, sad, heavy chant. First one point of light and then another broke the darkness, a long line of lights like a skein of birds flying. Master John and the castle people had drawn back against the wall.

One by one, pacing slowly, the Fairy Folk came up over the brow of the steep drop to the gorge. They were dressed now in dull winter-colored garments, mist gray, earth brown, fungus yellow; and instead of candles they carried heavy torches that flared and crackled sullenly on the night air. They were still singing, but there were no words to that song, or else they were not in a language Kate knew.

The procession ended with the torchbearers erect in two lines curving like horns from either side of the Standing Stone. Only the dark mouth of the path and the wide circle of turf before the fire were left clear. The chanting voices lifted to a wailing cry and then fell away into a dead silence.

In that silence a figure on a black horse emerged from the darkness at the mouth of the path. It was the Guardian of the Well. Even by the double light of the torches and the fire, he was still hardly more than a vague, uncertain shape, a shadowy head, a long bare bony arm that looked as though it were dripping with water. Nothing but the horse stood out clearly, and even the horse did not rear and neigh in panic at the sight of the flames, like a natural animal. Instead it walked forward, step by step, to the center of the circle and stopped there. The gray creature slipped down from its back and moved slowly across the turf to a place at the left of the fire. By chance or cunning, it was the one place where some trick of the shifting light made it almost impossible to see him. The horse remained standing like a rock, exactly as he had left it.

The Fairy Folk gave another cry, and to the sound of their voices a second rider appeared at the mouth of the path. This time the horse was brown, a little smaller than the first one, lighter and more finely made. The figure on its back could not be seen at all. It was covered with a brown veil that hung from head to foot, hiding it completely, and it was only when the fairy women sank down one by one into the Queen's bow as she passed them that Kate knew who she was.

The brown horse came forward and stood still beside the black one. The Lady dismounted and in her turn moved slowly across the turf to a place at the right of the fire, opposite the Guardian of the Well.

The castle people were moving too, walking into the center of the circle, the two grooms first and Master John behind them. The grooms took the horses' bridles and led them off through the archway into the courtyard, Master John following them demurely, very much as Kate had seen him follow the serving men out of the great hall a hundred times when his duties for the night were over. The sound of the horses' feet came up from the courtyard, moving away, faster and faster, as if both man and beast were trying to get under cover as quickly as they could. The Fairy Folk were already closing in to fill the break in the circle where the castle people had stood against the wall. The chant rose again, louder now, and somehow different: fierce, triumphant, and imperative, like a call or a summons.

And as if in answer, a third rider on a white horse came up over the brow of the hill into the dark gap at the entrance to the path.

He paused there for an instant, very clear against the shadows of the valley beyond, for everything about him caught and held the light. His whole head was covered with a golden mask like a helmet which hid it completely. But whoever had made the thing had evidently seen Christopher, for the golden hair and the rigidly set, beautiful face might have been his own except for the dark empty holes where the eyes and the mouth ought to have been. The light gleamed on the helmet, and shone over his short golden tunic, and was thrown back glittering from the golden armlet on his left wrist and the wide flat collar of golden links studded with great crimson jewels that lay around his shoulders. Even the hoofs of the white horse glinted faintly, as though they had been shod with silver.

Then the rider touched the horse's side with the heel of his golden sandal and came riding deliberately down into the ring.

Christopher had once warned Kate that the Fairy Folk believed that he had done with life already, and were training him to will and accept his own death; but what she had thought this meant was some enchantment of the sort she had seen at the Holy Well, that would turn him into a mindless clockwork horror again. Yet what she saw now was in its own way even more terrifying. His face was hidden, but in the lift of his head, in the touch of his hands on the reins, in every line of his body, there was the same remoteness that she had heard in his voice on the worst of his nights. The circle of the Fairy Folk with their torches might have been so many of the distant stars for all the heed he paid to them. Kate had a sudden strange feeling that even if she herself stood up and screamed out to him, her voice would come to him only as a faint meaningless sound, too far away for him to hear it.

The white horse turned in the center of the circle and stood still as the others had done, facing the fire. The cries of the Fairy Folk had died down again into a low murmuring chant, hardly louder than the sound of the flames. Then, cutting through their formless whispering, a voice rose out of the shifting shadows to the left of the fire. It was soft, almost gentle, but curiously clear; and as it spoke Kate understood at last what Christopher had been asking God for the strength to endure on the night when she had come upon him praying in the darkness.

"Teind-payer," it said. "Teind-payer, teind-payer, will you be nothing?"

Kate saw the golden mask turn in the direction of the voice. The Lady had told her that "only the Guardian of the Well could speak to him now" — and in this, as in other matters, she seemed to have been telling the exact truth, for evidently the voice had reached him; he heard it; he was listening. Then, with the same clarity, as if he were pronouncing the words of some ritual, he answered:

"I will be nothing."

"Will you keep the life that is in you, or will you be nothing?"

"I will be nothing."

"Not yet," said the voice, "Think. Will you keep the strength of your body, the force of your will, the power of your mind, the courage of your heart, or will you give them up to us, and be nothing?"

"I will be nothing."

"Not yet," said the voice. "Think again. Are you free to be nothing? To whom are you bound? Have you a father?"

"No," said Christopher.