The Sword of the Spirits (11 page)

“I am very well, sire. I will not trespass further on your kindness.”

Hans when he saw me was alarmed. He too urged me to stay in Andover, at an inn if not at the palace. We had enough gold to pay for a lodging. But I would not listen to him; I had to be out in the open.

He said: “Do we make for Salisbury now, sire?”

We had gone north, out of our direct way, to avoid Romsey land. I did not know what resentments lingered there and might be exercised against one who had conquered them as Prince but now was powerless.

“We ride that way,” I said, “but we will not enter the city.” He looked at me. “While I lack power I will stay away from cities.”

“And in Sanctuary the Spirits will give you power?”

My head was light and heavy at the same time. I laughed.

“If they do not, I think no one else will!”

We were riding down the main street that led from the palace. Three black-robed figures walked the opposite way: the Seer of Andover with two Acolytes. He saw me but affected not to know me, and I rode past with no salute. The Seers could do nothing for me at this point; and to have commerce
with me would compromise them needlessly. Ezzard's fate was still remembered. It was because of this that I had left Winchester without seeing Grimm.

I rode on to the West Gate. My head throbbed with pain and anger. The Seers could do nothing for me. The High Seers in Sanctuary were a different matter.

The day was windless but the cold bit savagely and deep into the bone. The sky was dark gray with a shade of pink in it: full of snow. Some was shed during the morning. Small flakes, scarcely more than white dust, floated slow, slow, and specked the frozen ground. By midday the snow had stopped, but the sky above us looked ready to burst with it.

We stopped to eat at an inn high up in the hills. I had no hunger but forced myself to take something; not this time to suit another's whim but to keep up my strength. I knew now I had a fever. My forehead burned when I put up a hand to wipe it. I saw my Aunt Mary again, and heard her say: “Starve a fever, child . . .” All right for a child at home, I told her, tucked in a warm cot—a journey in this weather was a different matter. Hans said: “Sire?” and I realized I must have mumbled words aloud. “Nothing,”
I told him, and returned to my dish. It was a game pie, foul looking and foul tasting. I felt sick but chewed and swallowed as best I could.

We rode again, and the snow came down more thickly. The flakes were bigger and began to whirl in dance as the wind got up.

Hans pointed. “Is that not Amesbury, sire?” I nodded. “It might be best to take shelter there. It will be worse before long.”

“No.” I heard my voice buzz and echo. “We will pass to the south of it. We can reach Sanctuary by nightfall.”

We came to the river and had to go south again, a long way south, to find a ford. The snow played a game with us, almost stopping and then blowing fierce in our faces. I felt giddy. My head at one moment was a bladder, which I feared might float off my shoulders and away among the snowflakes; the next a lump of aching lead.

I had been a fool not to do as Hans said. Snow covered the country all round us, obliterating landmarks. A fool in this, and in so many other things. Prince of Three Cities but two days since, and now . . . My teeth chattered in my burning head.
Then the chattering and the burning and even the pain seemed to go far away, out into the flickering whiteness of the sky.

Hans cried: “Sire, are you all right?”

I could not answer him. I felt myself slipping from the saddle and tried to grip the rein, but my hand would not obey me. The whiteness all round turned to black.

•  •  •

The nightmare had many parts to it and many characters. Harding was there and I cursed him. I swore vengeance, and saw the vengeance taken. His head stared down from the palace gate and a crow plucked his eyes. Then that changed, and it was not the palace gate but the East Gate, and the head was my father's. I wept, and beside me Harding laughed. Then in fury I killed him again and butchered his body with my steel. And the bleeding corpse got up, and mocked me still.

Edmund was there, too. I rode with him by the Contest Field, and pleaded with him, for our friendship's sake, not to wrong me. He spoke me fair, but looked beyond me and smiled at someone else. I knew who it was that won a smile he had never given me.

Blodwen came to me alone. She stood on the stair above her father's throne room, and said: “I will be my own woman always. Remember that, Luke of Winchester. I will be my own woman.” “Be what you will,” I cried, “as long as you are mine!” “I will be my own woman, Luke of Winchester . . .” “Be that, but not his, not his . . .” She smiled, and I cried: “Swear you do not love him!” She shook her lovely head. “No. That I will not swear.” “You are mine! Mine, and I shall have you.” She shook her head again. “No. You never will. But it does not matter. It does not matter because you are dying, Luke, in the snow. Edmund has me, and you are dying, dying . . .”

Then it was over. My spirit floated in air, without substance, without organs, but I saw and heard. She and Edmund walked together in the palace garden, their fingers linked. They whispered and I heard their whispering. “Poor Luke, dead in the snow. Poor Luke.” They laughed and, laughing, kissed.

My spirit winged like a bird, high over the city walls and across the blind white land. I hunted for my body, with one end in view. A body had an arm and an arm could hold a sword, and a sword would cut them down . . .

All this and more. Time had no meaning, any more than place or person. It went on endlessly, the taking and giving of pain. But at last there was quiet, and after the quiet, voices that neither jeered nor wept, but spoke evenly and with sense. I knew the voices, and knew this was no dream. I opened my eyes and there was whiteness here, too, but the whiteness of sheet and pillowslip. And I saw the broad wrinkled face of Murphy, the High Seer, clear in electric light.

•  •  •

He smiled. “How are you, Luke?”

“Well enough.” I felt weak but the fever was gone. “How did I get here?”

“You have that dwarf of yours to thank.”

“Hans? Is he well?”

“Yes. Since you were here last we have set up a television scanner on one of the standing stones. The barbarians press closer from the west all the time, and we cannot be sure they will recognize holy ground when they see it. We need to keep an eye open for visitors. But scarcely in a blizzard. Robb switched it on to make the routine test we carry out once a day. And to his astonishment he saw two
horses coming up the hill through the snowstorm, with a dwarf mounted on one and a body strapped to the other. And as they neared the circle the snow cleared and he saw the body had a face he knew.”

“Hans brought me here? That took courage.”

“So I would think.” Murphy chuckled. “You should have seen his face when the earth opened up in front of him!”

I thought of it. To have followed me to Sanctuary would have been a great enough thing. I remembered my own fear when I first saw the Stones, enormous in the empty hillside, and that had been on a fair day, with Ezzard the Seer guiding me. To have ridden up into the dread circle through a snowstorm, leading my horse with me unconscious or even dead on its back . . . I had been right to make him warrior. I did not think there was another in my army who could have done it.

My army . . . I said:

“He has told you what happened—or what he knows of it?”

“We knew already,” Murphy said. “From Grimm.”

Of course. Pigeons might not fly in a blizzard, but nothing stopped the invisible radio waves which
bound the Seers in the cities to the High Seers in Sanctuary.

“I have served you and your cause,” I said. “Now I come to you for help.”

“You were right to do so.”

“I want . . .”

I started to rise from the bed but weakness made me fall back. Murphy said:

“There will be plenty of time to talk of what you want. Get your strength back first.”

“Is Hans . . . ?”

“We had difficulty in getting him from your bedside but in the end tiredness overcame him. He is sleeping. You need to do the same.”

•  •  •

It was two days later—days marked by electric clocks, not by the rising and setting of the sun—that I spoke to the High Seers together. We sat in the big room whose walls were painted with landscapes, a trick to deceive the mind into thinking we were not underground but looking out through windows at the living earth. I do not know about the High Seers but my mind was not deceived. It made me miss the reality all the more.

But the High Seers, perhaps, having lived in this way so long, had grown used to it. And they had their mission, compared with which nothing else mattered. I looked at them: Lanark, Murphy, Robb, Gunter and the rest. They wore no formal robes but ordinary simple clothes, and their heads were not cropped. There was nothing to remark on in them. Nothing except the knowledge they held and hoped to restore; and the power that knowledge gave.

They put questions to me and I answered them as patiently as I could. Murphy said:

“It is a setback. There is no denying it. But there are favorable possibilities. This Eric of Oxford, who favors change. He is only Prince in Waiting, but we may be able to do something about that. Lukis is Seer in Oxford . . .”

I interrupted him. “I am sure there are intrigues that can be woven. But I did not come for this.”

Murphy started to speak again but old Lanark put a hand up to stop him. He said:

“Let Luke speak.”

I tapped the sword in my belt. There was no need for it here but I wore it. Perhaps it did for me what the painted walls did for the High Seers. What tricks
the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

“You gave me this,” I said, “the Sword of the Spirits. I killed my brother with it and took the city which you had planned I should have. But the city is lost to us now, and no sword will win it back. I need another weapon.”

They were silent, watching me.

“Our ancestors had weapons which killed at a distance. They called them firearms. You know of them and can make them for me.”

Robb said: “You would still need an army. One man cannot conquer a city even with firearms.”

“I will get an army.”

“From Oxford?” Murphy said. He shook his head. “Even if Eric were Prince he could not put guns in the hands of his army. There more than in most places their minds are closed against such things, but there is not a city throughout the civilized lands where men would accept them.”

“Not in the civilized lands,” I said, “but there is a city. The Prince at night watches a cinematograph film. They cut grass with machines and have crossbows to drive arrows. His Chancellor is polymuf.”

“Klan Gothlen? It lies very far away. And what
makes you think that Prince would help you? His daughter is in Winchester, and your enemy.”

“He owes me a debt.”

“Debts are not always paid.”

“One can seek payment.”

Murphy shrugged, in doubt. But Lanark said:

“This may offer something. There is no harm in trying in that quarter as well as at Oxford. We could send someone north in the spring, and see how the land lies.”

“The weapon,” I said. “You could give me such a thing?”

Lanark said to Robb: “Do you have a film to show us?”

“I think I can find what you want.”

While he was getting the film and others set up screen and projector, I said to Lanark:

“I thought I might find Martin here. He arrived safely?”

Lanark nodded. “And went on.”

“Went on? Where?”

“To the other Sanctuary. In the ruins of London.”

“You sent him there?”

“No. It was his choice.”

“What is it he is seeking?”

“I do not know,” Lanark said, “but he did not find it here.”

Robb ran the film. It was not like that scratched and jerky picture of comic animals which I had seen at Cymru's court. What one saw, unlike the paintings on the wall, looked almost real enough to touch. Men walked across a field, a line of fifty or more of them. They walked easily, talking and laughing. Then one saw other men, a few only, waiting in a thicket at the field's end. They carried long tubes of metal, with a triangle at the end and something sticking down underneath. They raised the triangles to their shoulders and put their hands round the part beneath. Harsh and savage sound, the stammering of tongueless giants, broke out. And the line of men fell, sinking like wheat to the sickle's sweep.

Robb switched off the projector and put up the room lights. He said:

“Is that the sort of thing you want?”

I was amazed and shocked, but I said: “Yes. And they can be made? Not just one, but many?”

Robb was a short thin man, with a skin even more pallid than the other High Seers. He wore spectacles with lenses of thick glass. He said:

“Many of our ancestors' weapons were complex things, but this is not. They called it the Sten gun. It can be made fairly easily.”

“Can it be used on horseback?”

“Probably. But a man on foot would control it better.”

Lanark said: “You say the sword we gave you is no longer enough, Luke, that you need a far more powerful weapon. You may be right. But you must understand that other changes follow the changes of weapons. Horses are bigger targets against guns than men on foot. When the Sten gun returns there will be no more riding into battle.”

I nodded, scarcely listening, seeing my enemies—Harding, Blaine, Edmund and the rest—struck down in their triumph and laughter.

“There is another thing,” Lanark said. “You are a man of Winchester. You found it hard to believe that Blaine could put swords into the hands of the Wilsh to fight his own people. Will you take a whole army of Wilsh against your city, and with
weapons such as these? Do you think you can?”