The Crown of Dalemark (10 page)

“Well, fancy that!” said everyone, raising cameras and jostling for the best shot of it.

After that Wend took the party into the ballroom, where he told them that the paintings on the wall and the ceiling had been done in the time of Amil II. Nobody knew what Amil the Great really looked like, and the purple trousers were a pure invention. This so amused Maewen that she left Wend's embarrassing presence in order to go down to the hallway and buy a postcard of Amil in his breeches and write a “Wish you were here” message on it to Mum and Aunt Liss. Then she made a foray into Kernsburgh itself to post it.

The city was even more crowded than the palace, and the traffic was terrible. A very few glances into the shops as she passed showed Maewen that she had barely enough money even for ordinary presents for Mum and Aunt Liss. Kernsburgh sold things from all over the world, and it was expensive. But the distressing thing to someone who had been brought up in the country like Maewen was that the place seemed to have almost no trees once you were down on street level.

“Where do all the trees go?” she asked Dad that evening.

It was a perfect example of the way she and Dad got on. Dad knew just what she was talking about although he was busy laying out sheets of stiff paper and notebooks on the other end of the table. “In people's gardens, I think,” he said. “I believe Amil the Great planned it that way, because there were no trees on the site when he started to rebuild Kernsburgh.”

“Then he made a mistake,” Maewen said. “It's all buildings and cars, and it makes me cough.”

“You'd have coughed worse when the place was new,” Dad said. “Two hundred years ago it would have been smog from coal fires. Though I'm never sure it was such a good thing when they discovered oil under the Marshes. It makes the Queen a rich woman, I suppose, but it has its drawbacks.”

“Where
is
the Queen?” Maewen asked. “I've been almost all over the palace now, and—”

“Oh, she very rarely comes here these days,” Dad said. “She's pretty old, you know, and she prefers the warmth in the South. She almost only ever comes to the Tannoreth for state occasions.”

“And the Crown Prince?” Maewen asked, feeling rather let down.

“He lives in Hannart,” Dad answered absently, busy with a notebook. “Doesn't get on with his mother or with public events.”

“What are you doing?” Maewen asked him.

“Trying to establish our family tree,” said her father. “It's a hobby of mine—and damned exasperating, too. You can come and look if you like.”

Maewen came and leaned on his square, warm shoulder, and he spread scrawled books and careful diagrams out for her to see. “Here,” he said. “My family. As far as I can tell we go back to one of the traveling Singers. I
think
his name may have been Clennen, but Singers wandered about so and were so little documented that it's a fiendish job to find out for sure. Compared with that period, the last hundred years were a doddle, and I thought those were bad enough. And when we get to your mother's family, things get even worse. Here.” Dad pushed sheets of paper in front of Maewen, hectically scrawled all over in pale pencil. “See? There's some connection with Amil II's brother Edril, but that's as far as—”

“You mean Mum descends from Amil the Great!” Maewen exclaimed.

“So do a lot of people. If you mean that accounts for your mother's standoffish vagueness,” Dad said dryly, “I hardly think so. If you remember that everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, you can see that almost everyone has to be related if you go back far enough. We're talking here about doubling the number of ancestors each person has every generation, and halving—or even quartering—the number of people those ancestors could have come from. The population of Dalemark was quite small until a hundred years ago.”

He was lecturing again. Maewen tried to listen. She was quite interested in the difficulties Dad had sorting out the two generations around the time of Amil the Great. School history didn't tell you half the confusions and revolutions there had been then. But there was so much of it. It had been dark for hours and she was yawning before Dad said, “Well, that will have to do for now. I've another long day tomorrow.”

Once she was in bed, Maewen tried to sort out how she felt about Dad and the divorce. She was very fond of Dad—achingly, fiercely fond—but not so much when he lectured. And try as she might, she could not be upset that he was quite happy to be divorced from Mum. She had expected to feel sad—she felt she
ought
to feel sad—but whenever she passed the big busy office on the floor below and saw Dad conferring with secretaries, snapping instructions at Wend, or consulting with Major Alksen—and sometimes all three at once—she was glad she did not have to live with him and Mum at once. These were two strong-minded people who were both utterly buried in their work. And one of those, Maewen felt, was enough at one time.

Next morning, as she chucked pieces of bread onto the leads for the fat waddling pigeons, Maewen discovered that sorting that out about Dad had somehow let her off having to remember everything about the palace. As it was another baking hot day, Maewen decided to go for a swim. Major Alksen had said she could use the staff bathing pool. But he had not said where it was. She set out to find him and ask him.

Downstairs she went to the office. It was so busy that though she could hear Dad's voice, she could not see him among all the other hurrying people. And the secretary nearest the door said that Major Alksen had already gone down to his security post. Maewen went down again to the great upper galleries of the palace, which were cool and quiet and empty yet, until the palace opened to the public. These long rooms were a sort of museum, where curios and clothes belonging to past kings and queens sat in cases among statues and pieces of carving that had once been on the outside of the palace. As a lot of the things were very valuable, Major Alksen was often there, patrolling with a radio phone, checking security. As she came into the first room, Maewen could hear his footsteps ringing in the distance somewhere and his voice talking into his radio. “Coming through Gallery Two now. All secure. Over.” She made toward the sound.

The person she saw when she went round the corner was Wend. Maewen stopped. How had he sounded so exactly like Major Alksen? Luckily Wend's handsome face was set intently on distance as he listened to the voice on his radio. He had not seen her. Full of embarrassment again, Maewen started to tiptoe softly round the corner.

“Don't go, Maewen,” said Wend. “I'll be with you in a moment. Right. Everything in place here. Over and out.”

What excuse could she possibly give for rushing away? Maewen wondered. So sorry, I need to swim this second. Forgive me, but I have to go and depress myself at once by seeing Amil's tomb. Excuse me, I must go and look at the Duke of Kernsburgh—urgently. Or she could just run away. But Wend was already turning toward her, and the only thing she could think of was to let him explain why he had been sent to meet her as if she were ten years old and get it over with.

“You must have wondered,” Wend said to her.

“No, no!” Maewen said. It seemed as if she did not want to get it over after all. “No, no, I never wonder—”

“Who that old man on the train was,” said Wend. “The one I sent away.”

This was so entirely unexpected that Maewen said, “Oh!” Then because she could feel her face was as red as it could be, she said, “He wasn't there. I dreamed him.”

“No,” said Wend. “He was—well—
there
, even if he wasn't what you'd call quite real. I'm afraid he's about to become a very big threat to you unless you let me help you.
Will
you let me help—or at least let me explain?”

“I—er—” Maewen was even more flustered. She was suddenly sure that Wend was mad. This was the only explanation for his grave, polite,
sane
look and the way it made her squirm every time she was near him. “Who
was
the old man?”

“A piece of Kankredin,” said Wend. “A pocket of evil. And”—he smiled—“I promise you I am not mad.”

This was worse than ever. “Yes, you are! You must be!” Maewen cried out, and she knew she would squirm even harder about this when she had time to think about it. “Kankredin's just a legend from the days of King Hern—and Hern killed him, anyway, when he conquered the Heathens.”

Wend looked his most serious, and there was a sympathy about him as if he understood precisely how she was feeling—which, if possible, made Maewen feel worse. “Yes, I know how the story goes,” he said. “People tell it like that because it's more comforting, but it wasn't the way of it, I assure you. Hern helped defeat Kankredin, that is true, but Kankredin couldn't die because he was dead already. The only way he could be conquered was for someone to unbind the One himself. You've heard of the witch Cennoreth. She unbound the One, and Kankredin was broken and scattered into a million pieces. But he wasn't dead. He came together over the centuries—concentrated, if you like, into larger and larger pockets—and eventually he was strong enough to take over the South and divide it from the North. Amil the Great found a way to destroy quite a bit of Kankredin, but even that didn't really defeat him. He was just scattered, and some parts of him came forward in time to these days. Other parts simply stayed around and arrived here and now by keeping secret and outlasting anyone who believed he was there. I'm not sure which kind of pocket you met, but I think from the way it behaved, it was one of the parts sent forward in time.”

“I don't believe you,” Maewen said. “How do you know?”

Wend shrugged. “I was there for nearly all of it. Hern was my brother.”

Maewen stared at him. “But that's”—she was going to say “nonsense!” but she stopped herself, because you had to be careful with mad people—“not possible, Mr. Orilson. You see, that would make you so old you'd almost be one of the Undying.” And no one believes in the Undying anymore, anyway, she thought, but I'd better not tell him that.

Wend nodded. There was a sad, priggish sort of sanity to him that Maewen found deeply suspect. “I found it hard to believe, too, when two of my brothers died and I didn't even age. It is hard to admit that you are anything but mortal. But the Undying exist whether people believe in them or not. I am one. You have probably heard of me. I was known as Tanamoril for a while. Then I was called Osfameron.”

Osfameron! The Adon's friend who raised the Adon from the dead! He's further round the twist than I thought a person
could
be! Maewen stared at Wend, all alone in the long empty museum room. Do all lunatics look this sane? I wish I knew. He'd look quite normal if he wasn't so good-looking. Keep humoring him until he gets called away to his duties. “What do you think this piece of Kankredin wanted with me?” Maewen asked gently.

“I think,” said Wend, “that he was trying to get control of you.”

Maewen's spine felt as if cold fingers were being trailed down it. She backed into the nearest glass case in order to feel safer. “Why—why would he want to do that?”

“Because you are the image of a young woman who lived just over two hundred years ago,” Wend told her.

“That makes no sense!” said Maewen.

But Wend continued talking as if he had not heard her. “A very important young lady,” he said. Looking at his constrained and serious face, Maewen thought that this was the heart of his mental disorder, whatever it was. She leaned on the glass cupboard and let him go on talking. “Noreth,” Wend said. “Born to rule all Dalemark. My grandfather the One was her father, and she knew from her childhood up that she was to take the crown and rule both North and South. When she had it, people would have risen to her all over the country, whatever the earls had to say.”

“What happened? Wouldn't she do it?” Maewen asked.

“I don't know what happened. She was willing enough.” Just for an instant Wend seemed to feel wretched about this. Then his face smoothed over. “I was guarding Noreth on the royal road,” he said. “The midsummer after her eighteenth birthday, as was right, she set off from Adenmouth to ride to Kernsburgh for the crown. Nothing should have gone wrong. I was as watchful as I could be. But somewhere along the way Kankredin got to her as he was trying to get to you, and she … simply disappeared.” Wend swallowed a little. Then, with his face all cold and smooth, he said, “That was how Amil, so called the Great, was able to claim the crown.”

Maewen stayed pressed against the glass. “And,” she said, gently and humoringly, “you're telling me this because I look like this lady.”

“No,” said Wend. “I'm telling you because I'm fated to send you back in time to take Noreth's place.”

“Fated?” said Maewen. “That's a strong word. You need me to agree first, and I haven't.”

Wend came nearer to laughing than she had ever seen him. “You forget,” he said. “I was there. So were you. So I know I did send you.” He had a funny lighthearted air to him, now that he had arrived at this point. “As I see it now,” he said, “I must have asked the One to send you to the moment on the royal road when Noreth disappeared, so that you could find out what happened and tell me when you came back here.”