The Fatal Child (11 page)

‘They’ve been kind to me,’ she said when the girl did not answer. ‘They brought me broth and a blanket.’

The girl said nothing.

Melissa was hurt. Yes, the woman was sick. Yes, she might be worried about that. But to ignore people – even when they offered to help – that wasn’t fair! It was so rare for Melissa to meet other children that she felt they might at least pay
some
attention to her when she did. She opened her mouth to say something rude, but shut it again, telling herself that it wasn’t right to be hard on someone who was already sad. She waited for the girl to show some sign. Then she realized the girl would not.

At the last moment, just as Melissa was drawing breath to snap,
Well, if you’re busy I’ll just get out of your way shall I?
the girl said, ‘Yes. You do that.’

‘What – tell them downstairs?’

The girl nodded.

‘All right,’ Melissa sighed. ‘If it’ll help.’

She looked again at the woman on the bed. She put a hand out and felt the skin. As she had thought – far too hot. Gently she folded the blanket back.

‘You can pull it up again if she starts to shiver,’ she said.

There was no reply. The girl sat like a carved thing. Looking back from the doorway, Melissa saw her still sitting there in the bright daylight from the windows and the woman lying on the pallet before her. The whimpering sound had begun again. It seemed to fill the whole room, and yet both of them were so still that it was hard to tell which it came from – the figure on the pallet or the one that sat straight-backed on the stool, with its head a little bowed as if in pain.

Melissa began to hobble back along the corridor. The short distance seemed a very long way. Before she reached the stairs she found it easier to get down on her knees and crawl. She kept going.

‘Someone is weeping.’

That was Lex’s voice, Padry thought.

The air in this place distorted sounds. It made thinking difficult. Padry’s head was swimming. His brain was repeating
Step, step, step
to itself, as it seemed to have been doing all his life. Step, step, step, on this journey without beginning or end.

It had been Lex. He had stopped and put his head to the ground. The figure of Talifer was standing over him. Padry toiled up to them, gasping in that heavy, dead air. He shook his head but still the low throbbing
filled his ears like a sound on the very edge of hearing. He hated it. He hated all this dry, dull land and the pale sky under which nothing ever seemed to change.

‘Listen,’ Lex said, still bent to the ground.

Padry sank to his knees and put his head to a stone. The harsh, powdery surface scraped at his ear. It was when he felt things like that – when he stumbled, stubbed his toe through his boot or scraped his palm on some boulder – that he knew he was not dreaming. That he was really where he seemed to be.

‘Can’t hear,’ he muttered.

‘The earth is crying,’ said Lex. He lifted his head. His eyes stared and his mouth was a short, thin line.

‘That is her,’ said Talifer. ‘That is Beyah, whom the hillmen say is the mother of the world. She has wept for three hundred years.’

‘Why does she weep?’ said Lex.

‘Because we killed her child.’

Padry could make no sense of the sounds. He climbed slowly to his feet. The face of Lex, the helm of Talifer, swam in his vision. ‘I need to rest,’ he gasped.

‘We must go on,’ said Talifer’s voice.

‘How far is it?’

‘Not far.’

Not far. But every step was far, and every step must be followed by another and another, and all the time with this feeling in his ears. He lifted his head and blinked at the dreary land. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since he had first set foot here, a lifetime ago. There was no sun but the pale sky, no moon or star but the light of the distant dragon. And
spread beneath them was the sea of brown rocks and the far mountain wall that never came any nearer. There was no path for his feet or his soul to follow.

‘We must go on,’ said Talifer.

Lex’s face passed – it might have been Lex, or a man much older, grim and drawn. Padry saw the shape of Lex’s horse, plodding patiently after his master. They were leaving him. He stumbled after them. He wished he could catch up, but no matter how his feet pushed and struggled on that uneven ground he never seemed to close the gap. He was seized with fear that he might fall behind, become lost and wander for ever with this weeping in his ears!

‘Angels,’ he muttered. ‘Look down on me. Walk with me.’

His fingers had crept to his belt. They found the dragon there. It was one of the signs he himself wore. He knew that. He had always known it. He wore it as an object of meditation, since, since … There had been an important moment. One that now he could not remember.

The dragon had meanings. That was why he kept it at his belt. It was a sign of eternity, and of faithfulness in the sight of the Angels. It should have been a comfort to find the dragon here …

But to see its fire! To feel the tears of the earth throbbing in the air! It changed everything, all meaning. That was what the Demon did. That was how witchcraft turned truth into lies. The things he clung to would be the things that most deceived. He understood it now. He almost understood it. The dull,
trembling feeling came from all directions, up from the very rocks themselves. The hill people sacrificed their children to appease their goddess, he had heard. Stumbling among the rocks, he could understand why they did. In the end almost anything would be worth it to silence that voice.

How many million tears had fallen? These rocks should have been a sea-bed. And every tear was another grief, another cruelty in the world he had come from. It was appalling to think of. It was madness, eating into his mind. It was the Abyss itself, the last sign of the Descent. A little more of this would drive him to …

Step, step, step. The fire of the dragon burning distantly. His hand at his belt, feeling for the comfortless signs: the dragon; the lantern; the leaf; his mind groping for the meanings they had once held for him. The Lantern: it lit the path from the Abyss. The Leaf (where was it? He fumbled. There!). The Leaf grew towards the light. The Dragon: did not loose his hold for pain …

It seemed to be darker now. He had not thought the light ever changed in this place.

Again. The Lantern, a light on the Path. (Path? There was no Path. But yes, strangely, there might almost be one now – pale and twisting before him on the rough ground.) The Leaf grew. The Dragon did not loose his hold.

The Lantern, a light…

There was a light ahead of him.

For a moment he thought it must be the distant
dragon-fire again. He must have lost his direction and gone stumbling off towards the rim of the world. In his fevered state it would have been easy. But no, the others were with him. And there was just one light, not two – a light very like a lantern, jigging ahead of them.

By the Angels! It
was
a lantern, held low in someone’s hand!

Suddenly it was quite dark. The ground beneath his feet felt different. It was still stony, but of a more familiar quality. The path – yes, it was indeed a path – seemed to float like a ribbon on the night-clouded terrain. The ground sloped down to his left. He could see the branches of trees, moving against the starlit sky. He could feel the air on his skin. He was hearing wind among leaves and, from somewhere below them, the sound of a stream. He was on a wooded hillside in the ordinary night of the world.

‘Praise be!’ he heard Lex exclaim.

The lantern was on the path ahead of them. It was waiting for them at the top of a low rise. As they approached, it lifted. Padry saw that it was held by a tall man. There was another, shorter man beside him.

‘Who is there?’ called the tall one.

‘It is Talifer.’

‘Greetings, Talifer,’ said the man, in a tone of mild surprise.

‘Greetings, brother,’ said someone else from the darkness beyond the lamp, in a voice deeper than the deepest bass Padry had ever heard.

‘And who the devil have you got with you?’ said the short man.

‘Two who seek the Prince Under the Sky.’

The lantern-bearer came forward, lifting his light. He was young and clean-shaven. His face was long but delicate, framed by dark, curling hair. He looked curiously into Padry’s eyes.

‘Master Padry!’ he said at length. ‘I think you have had a hard road. But if you are indeed looking for me, you have now found me.’

‘I am glad,’ panted Padry. He did not know how this young man knew his name, but after all the strangeness of the day it did not seem strange. He did recognize the companion, however – that short, sour, wolfish face. That was Aun, Baron of Lackmere, sure enough. The old brigand did not seem to have changed much in half a dozen years.

‘I bring you silver from your house, lord,’ said Talifer.

‘Good,’ said the baron. ‘We need it.’

‘And a message from your son, if you will hear it.’

‘I will not’

The young lantern-bearer looked at the baron but said nothing.

‘Sir,’ Padry said to him (not at all sure how to address a king whom he could not possibly acknowledge, but from whom he needed help). ‘I – I am searching for my charge, who is the daughter of the house of Baldwin. I believe she has been trying to make her way to you. Have you seen her?’

Again the young man studied Padry’s face. Padry stood before him, pleading silently in his heart for the words he needed to hear.

‘I think she is at the inn at Aclete,’ said the Prince Under the Sky. ‘We are going there now. You may come with us, if you will.’

Behind Padry, a third figure lurched from the darkness of the hillside – a hooded, crouching shape that fell into step beside Talifer. The tall guide bent his head as though in recognition. Lex muttered something and led his horse forward. Padry followed him along the path. And the King went before them with the lantern in his hand.

n one sense this ‘Prince’ was well named, thought Padry the next morning. He held his courts under the sky.

They were on the broad summit of the hill above the town, high up and exposed to a rough north wind. The clouds were moving fast and the surface of the lake was a heavy grey. The eastern shore, the heart of the Kingdom, was just a dark, featureless line on the edge of sight. The breeze rushed in the branches of a wood and stroked the grasses silver. There had been one rain shower already this morning. There would be more.

Padry had seen at least two big buildings in Aclete, the town at the bottom of the hill. Either of those would have had enough room for at least the immediate protagonists in each case. All the rest of this crowd could have waited their turn in other rooms, or huddled for shelter against the wall outside. Padry knew many a baron who preferred to sit in judgement under a roof. But here in Tarceny, it seemed, justice must be heard by everyone.

Nevertheless, Padry was grateful for the weather. The big breeze was the perfect antidote for the shadows in his mind – the nightmare memories of the place of brown rocks, which had pursued him in his sleep and still lingered in the corners of his brain. Cold air, wet wind – brrr!
This
was what he needed, after a night spent tossing on his straw! Better still, it gave him an excuse to huddle in his cloak and bring his hood well forward over his face. He did not want too many people recognizing the chancellor of Gueronius, or gossiping among themselves about why he was attending this upstart ‘King’ in Tarceny. That sort of rumour could be very uncomfortable if it ever came to court.

In the middle of the circle sat the Prince Under the Sky.

The ragged, lantern-bearing young man of the night before was squatting cross-legged on the ground with the Baron of Lackmere and a handful of other villainous-looking advisers standing around him. The boy wore a workman’s jerkin, cloak and leggings, with a thin, plain circlet of gold perched incongruously on his head and only a goatskin between his seat and the dank grasses. The crowd gathered around in deference.

‘You know who he is, don’t you?’ Lex had said as the two of them breakfasted in the mean hut where Lex had arranged their lodgings.

‘Not really,’ Padry had replied, wolfing bread and root soup.

‘I thought no master ever forgot a pupil. He was in
Develin with us, in the last winter there. He nearly stuck a knife into me – I’m not likely to forget that.’

‘A knife? In Develin?’

‘Oh, I probably deserved it. His name was Luke, then, although he seems to be calling himself something else now.’

Padry’s next morsel of bread had stopped halfway to his mouth.

‘Luke.’ Of course! And no wonder the young man had recognized him when he had lifted that lantern on the road!

‘Luke’: the name that the council of Develin had chosen for him, because it had been thought too dangerous for his real name to be known – Ambrose, the heir of Tarceny, one of the seven great houses of the Kingdom, and possible pretender to the throne. Padry remembered a haunted, hungry-looking thirteen-year-old, who had come on rather well in that winter while Develin had sickened around them, and whom he had thought dead with all the others in the sack.