The Fatal Child (40 page)

The light was fading on the last snowfield. Soon it would be gone altogether. But he was tired and cold. Here was as good a place to rest as anywhere in this cheerless land.

He drifted in and out of a doze.

As he sat there with his mind asleep, yet with his body aware of the hard rocks pressing his seat and back, it seemed to him that the colours changed. The sky was dull and pale. The mountains were no longer mountains but vague swellings in the ground that might have been any height or distance. The rocks were brown.

The rocks were brown, and now he could feel – not hear, for it was too low for him to hear, but feel – the sound of the mountain weeping.

He could see her, the woman the size of a mountain, weeping for a lost child. He could feel that weeping in his heart – all the loss and pain and darkness of the world, on and on, dragging at him like weights that pulled him into deep water. And he struggled and tried to look away, and still the weeping and darkness was with him. It had been a part of him since the beginning of his life and of the world. He could feel all the betrayals, all the murder, all the misery of three hundred years, settling with the weight of a mountain on his soul. He struggled to look away and could not. He was drowning, slowly, crushed in that enormous anger and despair.
Let them eat their sons!

Then, in his darkness, he realized that another voice was speaking.

It was not speaking to him, and he could not hear what it said. But he thought that there were words and that among the words were names. He knew there was someone else near him. It was as if he had been standing in a field at night, under all the blackness of Heaven, and had suddenly heard someone say something from not far away. And with that he felt the ground again, and distance had meaning, and the darkness was no longer supreme.

There was a woman, standing near the great weeping figure. She was speaking to it. She held one hand raised to it, as if she were asking for something. She was saying,
Please stop
, or
Please go away
, or
Please give me
what you still keep
– something like that. Padry did not know how long she had been there, or for how long she had been speaking. He wondered why he had not seen her before.

And with that he shifted, half woke, and knew that he was sleeping on a mountainside and that he would be very stiff in the morning. He tried to find a better position.

Again he dreamed the dream. First, nothing but the monstrous creature, and the terrible darkness of her grief: then, as if she had always been there, the second woman speaking to her. And again he woke.

Perhaps it was the third time, or perhaps it was the thirty-third, when his bruised and weary body knew that the sky away eastwards was colouring with the dawn and his mind still watched the two figures away across that dull land, that he saw the goddess stir. He saw her head turn to the woman who addressed her. He saw half of her face, a glimpse of cold, pale beauty. And he heard her speak.

She spoke one bitter, weary sentence. Then she bowed her head again. And Padry knew that he had seen something that had never happened before.

When he opened his eyes the sun was rising before him. It was filling the bowl around the pool with light. He screwed up his face, and shifted. His limbs groaned from a night propped on rocks. The air was cold. There was a footstep on the stones beside him. He looked up into the face of Phaedra, the mother of the King.

He looked up and knew her. And yet she was so
changed that he thought it was an achievement to have recognized her. Her face was drawn, almost haggard. And although her skin was as smooth as he remembered, there was an age and dullness in her eyes that he had seen only in those who had just learned that the ones they loved were dead.

‘When you see my son,’ she said, ‘tell him that she has said she will depart. And she has said that I will take her place.’

Painfully, he got to his feet and faced her. In her hands she held a waterskin and some dried biscuit. He recognized both. They had come from the saddlebags of his horse, on the other side of the ridge.

‘I have brought your breakfast,’ she said.

Tell him that I will take her place
, thought Padry as he chewed carefully at the biscuit. The mountain-woman wept for her son, who had been murdered by Wulfram and his men.

Wulfram had been beyond her vengeance, dead before she could exert her power. Instead each of his sons had been trapped in the pit of her grief – in the round pool before him, circled with the great white stones. Now they were free, all but one. Her power was diminishing. She would depart.

And Phaedra would take her place. How? Why? In Phaedra’s face, as she leaned over the pool, he saw the heaviness of her grief and fear. She would take that place because she, too, was to lose her child. Or so she thought.

‘Dieter,’ called Phaedra, softly over the pool.

And she might. There was treason in the air. A King who was blind to treason would pay with his life and the lives of many followers. Padry knew he must hurry.

He had now what he had come for. Against his knee rested the roughly cut stone cup that he had seen once before in her hands. He had tried it for weight, thinking of the long journey back to Tuscolo. And he had seen, as he held it in his hand, that in its stone and shape it was an echo of the fountains in the courts of the great houses of the Kingdom. And they in turn were echoes of that first cup from which Wulfram had made the woman of the Artaxalings drink her son’s blood. The Cup was an echo, too, of the pit and pool by which they now waited, and of that land of brown rocks, surrounded by high mountains, which in turn was a dream of the world.

‘Dieter,’ said Phaedra.

He must hurry. And that meant that Phaedra must hurry. Dieter must hurry. Because, Angels willing, the last prince in the pool would be his guide back to Tuscolo. He would walk a long, dark day in the land of the brown rocks, and by nightfall, or shortly after, he would be in the King’s castle with the Cup in his hands. Two weeks and three deaths coming. To return, just one dark passage for the soul.

‘Dieter,’ said Phaedra.

Nothing stirred. The sun had risen far enough to fall on the pool itself. The rocks of the cliff opposite danced with the reflections of light from its surface.

‘Should I call him, too?’ said Padry.

‘You may try,’ said Phaedra. ‘She has released him
and he knows it. He should hear any voice that calls him now.’

‘Dieter,’ called Padry experimentally.

The light wavered on the rocks and made no sound.

‘Dieter,’ called Phaedra.

‘Dieter,’ called Padry again. And there tumbled into his mind a memory – a memory of calling a name, over and over, with a woman standing beside him and calling, too. And the smoke had hung thickly in the air, and light had flashed upon the shafts of arrows that tumbled from the sky. And across the court the child had heard them and had come walking towards them as the spent arrows fell around her.

‘Dieter,’ called Phaedra.

And Padry cried, ‘Aha!’

Something was moving in the water. It had not troubled the surface yet, but there, where the water darkened and went deep – surely something had moved? There seemed to be a wavering shadow there, like a shapeless blanket or sheet floating below the surface. A long limb – or was it a tentacle? – showed dark against the pale rocks in the shallows. Bubbles rose.

‘There he is,’ said Phaedra. ‘The last of them. He will lead you to Tuscolo. I will not follow you. But I will be watching. And when my son looks into the Cup, I will be as close as I can.’

Padry rose to his feet. He picked up the Cup and cradled it in his left arm. With his right he beckoned to the water.

‘Dieter!’ he commanded.

And the first son of Wulfram, monstrous, rose bellowing from the pool.

‘Leave us,’ said Gueronius to his servants, once the wine was poured.

They bowed, cleared the remains of the meal and left the hall. Only three people remained: Gueronius, at one end of the short trestle table; Atti at the other; and Melissa, standing behind Atti’s chair. The hall was lit with many candles and the floor covered in fresh rushes. On the walls and tables, and on all the surfaces, were the blooms of many, many cut flowers, swimming in bowls of water. The brightness of the flowers had faded with the light beyond the windows but their scents still hung in the air, mingling with the flavours of meat and wine and the smouldering hearth.

Gueronius wore blue and yellow, the colours of his house. His face was painted Outland fashion in blue and yellow, his hair was curled and oiled, and his dark beard curled at the tips, too. The candlelight flashed from the rings on his fingers and gleamed from his eyes as he watched the woman at the far end of the table.

Atti sat poised in her place. Her back did not touch the wood of the chair and her lips did not touch the goblet that she held before her. She wore pale silks – so pale that they might almost have been pure white, except for the faintest hint of green. She wore powder but no paint. Her hair was tightly braided and decked with jewels. Melissa had worked for hours on it that
morning, before the two of them, and a small escort, had made the short ride from their roadside quarters over to Gueronius’s manor.

Gueronius let his eyes rest on Melissa.

‘Your numbers are always few, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘And yet I warrant they would guard you well, if you wished it.’

‘There are those who are devoted to me,’ said Atti simply. ‘I am grateful for it.’

‘Aye, and so am I! I would have none but the very best guards around you wherever you went – so long as you wished it.’

You want her to make me go
, thought Melissa.
I know that. She knows it, too
. From beyond the hall door came the clink of armour as a guard paced by on his watch.

‘The devotion of others is a great gift,’ said Gueronius. ‘And you are rich in it. I wonder if Your Majesty understands how rich you are. With enough of it, anything becomes possible.’

‘Why, sir, how so?’

‘Why? It is plain. Before there is law there must be power, and all laws bend to it. I have been King, Your Majesty. I know this. But devotion – let us call it love – is a power, too …’

‘So it was once said to me,’ murmured Atti.

‘… It lives in all our songs and stories, and contests against wrong as though it were the most gallant knight of all. When we tell of its victory, we see that the truth of it is rewarded. Even when we tell of its defeat – for love may end in death, it is true – we say that it is justified, for no right is held greater than the power of
love. We sing these songs and tell these stories because this is what our hearts tell us – even as the ink-stained finger writes another law for us lovelessly to obey.’

Atti, Atti
, begged Melissa.
He only says it because he wants you. That’s all his pretty words mean. You see it, don’t you?

‘Is it not the one who wins the victory that afterwards sings the songs?’ said Atti coolly.

Gueronius shook his head. ‘Not always. Oh, I grant you,
The Tale of Kings
is a tissue of lies. I have been King, have I not? And so are many songs like it. But when we see a love that is true, that we all know in our hearts, then we will sing of it from our hearts and let the false victor eat the ashes of his victory.

‘And,’ he added, glancing at the fire, ‘when men see a love that is true, and there is still the time and chance to take up iron for it – why should not Love be the victor? Why should not the law be rewritten, so that Love – which is the true King – be placed once more upon its throne? This is what I believe, and I believe it with all the fire of my soul. Yes. Love is more than law, more than iron, more than fire. Love is from Heaven itself, and so let us thank Heaven for it.’

Very slowly, Atti sipped at her wine. She looked down at the dark surface in her goblet and did not raise her eyes to the man opposite her.

Let him crawl
, pleaded Melissa in her heart.
You like that. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? But don’t let him have what he wants
.

Play your games if you must. Make him wriggle on his belly for you. He’ll do it. He’ll crawl all round the floor and cover his hair with ash if you tell him to
.

But don’t, don’t, don’t give him what he wants. Not this time!

‘Is Love more than law?’ said Atti coolly.

‘It must be!’ cried Gueronius, and his fist hit the table. ‘What is law but tyranny, if it is not given with Love? My lady, did one love me, I should set them in judgement over all I did. Yes, even if I were King again, and fount of all the law, I would set that one above me in judgement in my courts and over all my subjects. And I would have no fear, because the one that loves me could do me no harm.’

Again Atti sipped the wine.
In judgement in my courts
. She would like that. He had known she would like it and she knew that, too. Her eyelids were lowered, masking her face. The whisper of the fire, the clink of mail beyond the door, were like the voices of little devils in the quiet of the room.

‘So thank Heaven that you are loved, Your Majesty,’ said Gueronius. ‘Thank Heaven for it, when you are on your knees before your shrine. And also ask, maybe, that Heaven guide you. For some choices that it sets before us we may make any day or every day of our lives. But some we must make once, and at once, or they may even be gone before we are aware of them.’

Melissa waited, helpless. Even to the last second she could not guess what Atti was going to do.

‘Melissa,’ said Atti, without taking her eyes from her cup. ‘You may leave us now.’

Into the antechamber of the King Padry stumbled with the Cup in his hand. He swayed and might have
fallen if the King himself had not jumped up from his place to catch him by the arm. Padry’s mind swam with visions of the brown rocks from which he had emerged. If he closed his eyes he could still see them, all around him, with the great wall of mountains rising in the distance and the two fires burning on the peaks where the dragon lay along the rim of the world. He could still see the loping, misshapen figure of the prince who had guided him, now beginning to shamble away across the dead landscape back to the hills where it might begin to learn to be a man. He could see them and at the same time he could see the face of the King before him, pale and alarmed, holding him in case he fell.