It was her voice, broken and failing, which made him turn to her and then, running forward, catch her by the shoulders. I saw his fingers tighten and her face twist with pain.
“What is it?” he demanded. “Tell me, girl!”
She dropped her head. The words were very faint, but one heard them.
“She is dead, sire.”
FOUR
RIDING NORTH
KERMIT SAID: “SHE DROWNED, SIRE. That is all.”
He was palace surgeon, and had held this office as far back as the reign of Prince Egbert, Stephen’s father. He was tall and thin with a face like an egg, having a fuzz of white whiskers at the bottom of the oval and a thinner matching fuzz at the top. He had two younger surgeons to assist him and treated them with contempt. His pronouncements were usually brief and always final.
My brother said: “But how drowned?”
“She was in her bath, and alone. She fainted, one must suppose, and slipped beneath the water.”
“She was young, healthy. Why should she faint? Can you be certain she was not poisoned with some drug?”
“She drowned,” Kermit repeated. “If she had felt illness, a pain, she had a maid within call, in the next room. She could have been at her side in a moment.”
Peter said bitterly: “She should have been with her, not in another room.”
“That is so,” Kermit said, “but it was not permitted. It is known your Lady had strange scruples.”
He was speaking of that extreme modesty of the body which all the Christians had. The women wore long enveloping gowns. Ann had refused to have maids attend her in her dressing even.
Peter groaned, his whole body shaking. “If I had known . . . !”
Kermit said: “You asked, why should she faint? When a woman is with child she may have spells of dizziness. If she lies long in hot water it may be more likely.”
Peter stared at him, hot eyed. “Why did you not prevent her, knowing that?”
“Prevent? I advised against too much bathing. You have heard me. She did not listen.”
“You did not tell me there was danger to her.”
Kermit shrugged. “There is always danger in ignoring a surgeon’s words. But no harm would have come had she kept her maid beside her.”
Peter was silent. He looked as though he fought against something in himself: an impulse, perhaps, to strike down this creaking old man who showed more pride than pity. Kermit asked at last:
“Is there anything further I can do, sire?”
“Can you bring her back to life?” Kermit looked at him but did not answer. “Then go!”
He went stiffly, his dignity ruffled by the brusqueness of the dismissal. Peter and I were left alone. He shook his head from side to side and his face was creased with naked pain. He said:
“Luke, how did it happen?”
“I do not like the man,” I said, “but it must have been as he says.”
“If someone came in . . . and found her there defenseless. An assassin could have held her head beneath the water—so easy a thing.”
“Came in from where?” I asked. “Beneath the window there is a drop of fifty feet, and a guard patrolling at the bottom. The maid was in the next room and beyond that there is the corridor and another guard. There is no way for a man to come in. And if he got in, how could he get out again?”
“The maid might have been bribed. I could have her put to torture.”
“You could,” I said. “But the maid was Gerda, who for years served your mother and tended you as a boy.”
And who came to me, I could have added, when that mother lay under sentence of death, begging me to visit her so that she in turn could plead with me to intercede for her son.
Peter banged a fist against his head. “I think I am going mad. . . . To talk of torture—what would she think of it? But I am tormented with miseries and hates. I almost hate her, whom I loved and love. That she should have been so careless of herself: she had no right!”
I had a feeling he would have liked me to go to him, to embrace him. I could not do it. The news had shocked me as much as it had him, but there were differences in our minds. There were things I could not help thinking of, however hard I tried to put them away.
“I made a jest of it. They were my last words to her.” He squeezed his eyes shut and tears ran from their corners. “If I could but call them back!”
• • •
She was buried with Christian rites. There were murmurings about this, though not in Peter’s presence. At her funeral there was no Seer, no Acolytes, no solemn procession to the Seance Hall with the casket in a carriage drawn by black horses, purple garlanded, and everyone, nobility and commoners, dwarfs and polymufs, following on foot to do her reverence. Instead her coffin was taken on a simple cart, drawn by one old piebald horse, to the North Gate, and so out to the patch of ground where the Christians buried their dead. The Christians went with her, and Peter and I, but he would have no others. The ground was hard with frost: they had been forced to use low braziers to thaw it, inch by inch, so that they could dig. We stood by the grave and the priest spoke the ceremonial. A sharp wind blew along the foot of the walls, lifting a fine powder of snow, and they listened with chattering teeth. Few of them, since they were all so poor, had cloaks that would keep out the cold. Standing there, chill myself in my Captain’s topcoat, I heard but did not heed. I was full of thoughts which turned round and round in my head, dizzy and frightening.
• • •
This was the second time within a few years that the Prince’s Lady had died in winter, and although this time there was no ugliness of murder the gloom that settled on the palace and city was scarcely less deep. Unlike my father my brother, at the outset, looked for my company. He would spend hours talking to me of Ann, repeating over and over small things, anecdotes from the life they had shared. But whereas it had hurt me that my father withdrew into a private sorrow, strangely I did not welcome this talk, and found myself slow and awkward in response.
Sometimes the Christian priest was with us. He was a weak-looking man, small in stature and with a stoop that at times gave him a look of one of those polymufs who carry a second back upon the first. As though in copy of the Seers his head was shaved, apart from a thin circle of hair round the base of his skull, and he wore black like the Seers also but in a garment more resembling a woman’s.
His voice, though, was strong if his body was weak. He talked in deep tones and was never lost for words. He was always on about this god of theirs, and there were some tales that even I found worth listening to. It seems that when soldiers were sent to arrest him, one of his men very rightly drew his sword and sliced an ear off one of the guards. But the man-god rebuked his follower, saying: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” What I could not understand was what was wrong with a sword death. Was it not a better end than dying starving in a ditch, as many of these Christians looked like doing? I thought of asking the priest that, but then thought it would only bring on another flood of words and did not.
He consoled Peter, as Ezzard had done my father, by declaring that he and Ann would meet in a better world than this. Ezzard had been able to further the deception with the machine through which my mother’s living voice had been captured on a moving tape, to be heard again in the darkness of the Seance Hall. The priest had no such aid, but he did well enough with words.
And I, for my part, sickened of them, and of the black atmosphere which I could do nothing to lift and which roused troubling feelings in me: even a sense, although I knew it was absurd, of guilt. I withdrew more and more from my brother’s presence and he, listening to the priest, seemed not to mind. The winter wore on, with blizzards and biting cold that froze the snow in the streets into ridges which the polymufs could not shift. It seemed that it would last forever, continuing day after bitter day.
Then in a night the weather changed. I awoke to rain drumming against my window. It fell all morning, carrie
d on a wind from the west that seemed almost warm after the northeasterlies we had endured, and long after it had stopped water dripped from the eaves as the last of the icicles melted.
Within days the trees were budding. The small green spears had a look of impatience to them, of bursting out from restraint. I felt the same urge to be free of things that bound me. I found Peter alone, without the priest, and said:
“We must talk about the summer’s campaign.”
He shook his head. “There will be none.”
“Why?”
“She hated war, as you know.”
“She was a Christian. You are not.”
“But I will not lead out the army in the year in which she died. Next year, perhaps.”
I saw he would not budge. But it was unendurable to contemplate a summer penned in the city with this grieving man. I had hoped the fighting would work a change in both of us. If it was not to be I must find some other way. I said:
“The embassy still goes north, across the Burning Lands?”
He said indifferently: “I suppose so.”
“I asked you once before for permission to go with it. I make the same request now.”
“You are anxious to leave me, Luke.”
“I must do something!”
He did not respond immediately. I thought he was going to refuse and prepared to argue for it. But he said:
“If you are so eager for it, then go.”
“May Edmund go with me?”
I did not need to add, if he wishes. I knew what his feelings would be. My brother turned away to the window. It was raining once more, a gray rain thick with ash from the Burning Lands. He said:
“Take whom you like. See Greene about it.”
• • •
Dwarftown lay across the river, toward Eastgate. None of the houses there were tall but they were solidly built and brightly painted, and decorated with much gleaming brass. Nearly all had window boxes and when I arrived, on a Sunday morning, I found Rudi attending to his. He was putting out hyacinths which he had grown indoors during the winter. They were in full bloom—blue and pink and white.
He greeted me and took me indoors. The rooms were low of ceiling and I had to watch for my head. There were a number of cabinets and sideboards bedecked with china and brass ornaments, many warm-colored cushions lying about, and the walls themselves were painted in differing hues. In the room to which I was taken two of red faced two of yellow, and the ceiling beams were a deep blue.
Rudi showed me to a chair which I guessed was kept for human visitors: it stood higher from the ground than the rest and was generally bigger. Very much bigger—I felt lost in it. I told him I had come to see his son, Hans, and he sent a polymuf maid to call him. Although not high the houses were extensive and I knew Rudi’s rambled back over a considerable area. It was several minutes before the son came.
Like Rudi he was tall for a dwarf. Had he been born of human parents a tolerant Seer might have passed him at the Showing. He bowed gravely to me and stood watching in silence from just inside the door. I am dark of complexion and hair but he was far more so, a swarthy lad with a curly beard springing. His face was broad but the eyes did not have the relaxed, even sleepy look one expected of his kind; they were alert and watchful.
I said: “Hans, your father has told me that you would like to go on campaign with the army. As a servant, of course, with the baggage train.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“I promised I would arrange this.” The eyes watched me, showing nothing. “But there will be no campaign this summer because my brother mourns his Lady.”
The eyes shivered briefly with disappointment; then he was impassive. He said:
“I understand, Captain.”
His voice was low and harsh but sure. I liked it, and the look of him altogether. It was some time since I had seen him bringing his father’s dinner to the forge, the pot wrapped round with towels to keep in the heat. I had paid him no more attention than any other dwarf boy; but I remembered him now and felt he had improved greatly. I had come here with my mind undecided, chiefly inclined to give him this word and go. But I said:
“There will be no campaign. But I myself will ride north, with the troop that is to go across the Burning Lands to the city from which the peddler came. I am not in command but as a Captain I may take a groom with me. I make no promises—we may not get through the pass—but if you wish I will take you.”
He did not reply immediately and I thought: I have been mistaken, the notion scares him. Then he quickly crossed the room and dropped on one knee before me. Eyes staring up, he said:
“I thank you for this honor, Captain. I promise I will serve you faithfully in every way, for as long as I live and you have need of me.”
It was the ritual speech required from polymufs when they came into adult servitude but said, unlike theirs, with passion and also pride. I took his hand and raised him. Over his shoulder I said to Rudi:
“Does this content you?”
He smiled. “It contents me, Captain.”
I said: “He is to be my groom and we go into unknown lands with many hazards. It would be well for him to take a sword.”
Hans stared at me, his chin thrust forward, a small incredulous smile on his lips. Rudi said:
“I will make it for him.”
• • •
There had been no banquets since Ann’s death but the Captains were called to the palace the night before the embassy was to leave. There was meat in plenty and much ale was drunk but the jests were few and there would plainly be no singing. When my brother stood up, they watched in silence.
He gave a toast to the expedition’s success. Then he said, dry-voiced:
“I have another thing to say. I will not speak of my loss but you know that it was double. The last time you were assembled here you drank to my son, the Prince to be. There are Spirits, it is said, that watch for pride in men, to punish it, and maybe they sought me out.”
He stood wordless for so long that the Captains grew restless. I wondered if he had forgotten what he meant to say and if I should pluck his sleeve to remind him to sit down. But he spoke at last.
“I will take no other wife and therefore will have no son. So my brother is my heir. It is I this time who name him Prince in Waiting, not the Spirits. I bid you drink to that.”
• • •
When we were alone I said: “There was no need of it.”
“Need enough. It is wise to say these things plainly.”
“And too early to talk of having no second wife. Your mind is still unsettled by grief.”
“I think not. Luke, your time may come sooner than you guess.”
I looked at him. He was thinner but otherwise well enough. And I could not believe he would seek to take his life: the time when it might have happened was surely past. He said:
“If I should become a Christian I must give up the sword, and no Prince can rule without it.”
“You would not do that!”
“I do not know.” He shook his head. “Maybe it would please her spirit.”
• • •
Martin came to me in the palace that night. To bid good-by, I thought, but there was more to it: he brought a message from Ezzard. I listened and said:
“The answer is the same as before. I am determined to go.”
He said earnestly: “It is different now that you have been named Prince in Waiting again. And there are rumors. . . .”
“I can guess what they are. So people listen to the gossip of Christians now? But maybe the Christians boast too soon. Sorrow mends, and his mind will mend with it.”
“Ezzard knows more of these things. And you know what rests on your success.”
I had assumed he had been told enough to understand the true significance of the Seers and Sanctuary, but we had never discussed it. We had older bonds and I preferred them to this. I said:
“There are limits to Ezzard’s wisdom. Has he asked h
imself what the Captains would think of someone who proposed himself for such a thing, and then withdrew? I think they would sooner have a swordless Prince than a coward.”
“It need not seem like that. Illness could prevent your going.”
“And what name will Kermit give the illness: heartsickness?”
“It would be a true fever. Kermit and his assistants have been deceived before.”
That was so; it had been an appearance of illness, contrived by Ezzard in one of the four named as Young Captains, that had given me my chance in the Contest. From which so much had come. I said:
“I will have no more to do with Ezzard’s tricks than is necessary. And I will go with the others tomorrow. Tell Ezzard not to try to stop me.”
Martin shook his head. “He will not do that.” He paused. “I envy you and Edmund.”
I put my hand on his black-clothed arm and squeezed it. “I wish we could have you with us. But it would look strange, an Acolyte riding with a troop of horse. And Ezzard has need of you here, I imagine.”
“You are not the only one who tires of Ezzard’s needs.”
He had always been frail of body compared with me. He had grown taller and matched me in height but seemed to have put on scarcely any weight. His chest was narrow, his brown eyes very big in a face peaked and white and given to frowning. It was to be expected from sitting indoors all day, hunched over books. I said:
“You could come with us. If you put off that black dress and leave the Seers.”
“How is it possible? I am bound by vows.”
“From which Ezzard can dispense you.”
“But would not.”
“If I demand it, he must. I share the secrets of the craft, remember. He will release you to me.”
For a moment he looked half hopeful, then shook his head.
“It is not possible, Luke.”
I shrugged. “It is true there is little time before tomorrow. And tongues might wag. But we will talk of it again when I return.”
He said, speaking more to himself than to me: “It was knowledge I sought. Knowledge which is clean and pure, far above the cheating and deceiving in which most men spend their lives.”