The Fatal Child (25 page)

His sentences followed one another in a voice as flat and sibilant as shoe-leather on stone.

‘I cried out when I saw it, for it was the same as my own. In jest I accused my brother of having a spy in my house. He denied it and said the idea was his. I grew angry. The other princes came running at our cries. They saw the court, too. And each swore that they had built one the same, without knowing another existed.

‘We had seen it, each of us, in the depths of our
dreams. The court, and the cup in the centre of it. And we had each built it, in Ferroux, in Tarceny, in Tuscolo and Velis, in Trant, Baldwin and Bay. And by this fountain we looked at one another. Our eyes were wide with fear. We knew that some spell had been laid upon us all. But it was already too late, then. Knowing it did not help us. One after another we came to the pit.’

Melissa looked at the great stone bowl, waist-high on its stem.

‘It’s a cup, then, is it?’

‘Of course.’

‘And there’s one in Tuscolo, too, is there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe I’ll go there when I want to weep.’

Rolfe did not say anything.

Melissa cleared her throat. ‘I’m going to hug you,’ she announced. ‘It’ll help me.’

He neither spoke nor stirred as she put her arms around him. His cloth was as dank as old canvas. Beneath it his body was hard as rock. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. Then she got to her feet.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you should go now.’

‘Wait,’ he said.

She turned back to him, wondering if he wanted her to hug him again. But he was sitting exactly as he had been, with his eyes on the paving below the fountain.

‘There is something there,’ he said. ‘Do you see it?’

It was a white pebble, plain on the gloomy flagstones.

‘He was playing with it when we came up,’ she said. ‘I suppose he forgot it when …’

When he went off hand in hand with Atti.

‘You must pick it up,’ said Rolfe. ‘I cannot touch it.’

She walked over, bent, and plucked the thing from the moonlit stones of Tarceny. It was the King’s white pebble, small enough to fit into the pit of her palm.

‘Take care of it,’ said Rolfe. ‘It is cut from the tooth of the dragon.’

There seemed to be lines chiselled into it. She traced them with her finger. They were not letters, she thought. She knew what letters looked like, even though she could not read them. They looked as if they were part of a pattern. The pebble had been cut from something bigger.

Cut from the tooth of a dragon? What dragon?

When she looked up from it to ask, Rolfe had gone.

n the fifteenth day of the new year Ambrose crossed the lake with a handful of followers from the March. He made his landing under the ruined walls of Trant castle, which had once been his mother’s home. All the land around Trant was war-wasted. The hillsides were empty. Wild beasts scurried in the thickets and a cloud of crows lifted from the untended olive trees. There was not a plough team or goat flock or fishing boat to be seen. The castle walls were green with ivy and brown from weather, and its windows were as dead as the eyes of a corpse.

But there were men there, all the same. Hidden in the ruins was a troop of knights, drawn chiefly from Develin, but also some sent from Lackmere and from Jent. Their captain was Caw, the lady’s marshal, and he led his men out to drop their lances at the feet of their ragged King. They had spare mounts with them, and news, plans, and more messages. For half an hour the men spoke in quiet voices under the banner of Tarceny. Then the horses kicked the dry
earth with their feet and the dust rose behind the cavalcade as it pressed inland.

Messages were sent ahead to Tuscolo, demanding that the city declare itself. But neither Caw nor Aun of Lackmere would wait for a reply.

‘Our necks are already in the noose,’ Aun said. ‘Delay now and the other side will start to reckon the odds. March boldly and they will think you already crowned – if they have time to think at all.’

They covered twenty-five miles the first day, and at the end of it found a baron of the north, Lord Herryce, waiting with another two-score men-at-arms to pledge his allegiance. On the second day they forced their pace, marching thirty-five miles closer to the capital. They passed by three castles, including one belonging to the regent Lord Joyce, but no one opposed them. They halted that night within five leagues of Tuscolo.

Again riders went out, demanding yet more from their horses. They were under the city walls by dawn, hammering at the gates and shouting the arrival of the new King with a great force. But Ambrose’s party did not break camp the following morning. They rested and fed their mounts, repaired their harness, sharpened their weapons and put on their armour with care. Only when the sun had begun to decline and the heat of the day was past did they mount and move warily towards the city.

Messages dribbled back to them during the afternoon: from Lord Seguin, defiance and a demand that they surrender; from the Lord Chancellor Padry,
to say that the treasury was secured for Ambrose and had been removed to a secret place; from Lord Joyce, proposing a parley before the walls and also that a Great Council of the nobility and clergy should consider Ambrose’s claim to the throne; from the Bishop of Tuscolo, urging that there be no bloodshed; from a city burger called Wrathmore, begging that the new King consider urgently his case against the Mercer’s Guild as soon as he was installed in the city.

They pushed on. Aun of Lackmere had his men stop every traveller coming away from the city and make them march back towards it in Ambrose’s train. They pressed donkeys, carts and drivers from the fields to join them, too. The column straggled back for a mile along the road, raising a great cloud of dust on the sun-blasted earth, which drifted high into the sky for the watchers of Tuscolo to see.

Another report came, from one of their own outriders. The city gates had been closed. Some of their men, already in the city, had been cut off. The citadel was flying flags with the devices of Gueronius and Seguin. At that, Caw ordered a halt and Ambrose called a council of war. But even as Caw and Aun were arguing about what to do, more horsemen arrived. The gate was open again. Moreover, Lord Joyce was now bidding them come with all speed. A crowd was said to be gathering on the walls.

‘Quickly then,’ said Aun. ‘We must be there by sunset or our moment will have passed.’

On they went. The sun dipped behind them, throwing great shadows of the horsemen forward on
the road. They topped a rise and there was the river and the city itself on the near bank. Its walls and towers were bathed orange in the long light. There were banners drooping in the air, and a crowd massing by the gate. The road led down towards it. People were beginning to gather at the wayside, landsmen hurrying from their fields to gawp at the passers-by and townspeople come out from the gate to call blessings on the new King or shout their own petitions for when he should come into his own. Rough garlands were hoisted up on sticks to the leading riders. Ahead of them the gates were indeed open.

‘Now cheer, you dogs!’ cried Aun. ‘Ambrose Umbriel – King!’

‘Hurrah!
’ bellowed the escort. And the cheering spread back down the line to the followers they had forced to come with them, and ahead to the crowd at the gate, dissolving into a shapeless, endless barrage of noise as Tuscolo, a city of ten thousand souls, welcomed its new master home.

In the gateway stood the bishop, with the keys of the town. On his right, in armour, was Lord Joyce, a small man with a huge plume and a little rat face peering out through his open visor. On his left was the chancellor, Thomas Padry, with a wreath of oak leaves in his hand. Hastily made banners were waving among the crowd: the black-and-white Moon of Tarceny, the Sun and Oak Leaf of Trant, and banners of any colour with the letters AU stitched upon them, which stood not only for ‘Ambrose Umbriel’ but also recalled Aurelian, the last High
King, whose reign a century before had been counted a golden age.

Before the doors Ambrose dismounted. He knelt for the bishop’s blessing, then stood to receive the keys and the wreath. All three men bowed to him.

‘Welcome, Your Majesty,’ they said. ‘Welcome to your city.’

‘Where is my Lord Seguin?’ demanded Ambrose.

‘Your Majesty, he left by the east gate an hour since,’ said Lord Joyce. ‘He had but few followers with him. Loyal men hold the castle of Tuscolo for you.’

‘Then may the Angels be praised,’ said Ambrose. ‘For there will be no blood shed today.’

And on foot, with crowds around him and armed men at his back, he entered the city of kings.

Melissa reached Tuscolo with Atti a week later. Even before she arrived her head was in a whirl. She had crossed the lake by boat, which she had never done before (water all around her – as far as the eye could see!). She had passed strange fields, with few trees, yellow grass and pale brown earth all cracked and baked hard from the sun. And now she was in the city, where there were houses and more houses, people and more people, stalls and street criers and smells that punched into her nose; walls further around even than those of Tarceny; buildings with their own towers, some of which were called chapels and were supposed to be holy; whole streets in which only meat was sold, or only leather goods, or only iron. When she lay down at night, all the images of the day went on
going round and round in her mind, chasing her into her sleep and tumbling among her dreams.

But there was no time to stand and gawp, because from the moment she arrived she was running errands for Atti. These were mostly messages for this person or that to find the things Atti wanted for the apartments that had been set aside for her, or for clothes, or for someone or other to come to see Atti instantly because there was something she needed to discuss with them. And Melissa would hurry through the great castle, getting lost and finding her way again, asking and finally tugging on the person’s sleeve to get them to stop what they were doing and listen. And then when she returned there would be another errand, and another.

‘I shall need a lady-in-waiting,’ said Atti to the mirror on the third morning while Melissa was arranging her long hair for her. ‘At least one, and preferably six. Find me pen and paper, and I shall write to my Lady Joyce and my Lady Faul for their help. I shall need a clerk, too, I suppose.’

‘Can’t I be your lady-in-waiting?’ asked Melissa, frowning at the plait in her fingers and trying at the same time to remember what a
pen
and a
paper
and a
clerk
were, and where she was supposed to find them all.

Atti’s head turned slightly. ‘No, Melissa. You cannot be.’

A lady-in-waiting, Melissa discovered, had to be a lady herself. Lady Something diThis, or Lady Somebody of That, with servants of her own to look
after her. Some of them could be young – the daughters of any important Lady Whoever. But the chief lady-in-waiting had to be someone important in her own right, and a lot older than either Atti or Melissa. Melissa did not feel so bad about it once she had understood that.

But it was hard nonetheless, on the day of the betrothal, when she and the half-dozen other servant girls whom Atti had employed stood back from their mistress (on whose hair and face and hands they had been working since dawn) and watched the young Lady Someone give Atti her fan, and the Lady Thingummy pick up the baby lynx that Atti had been given, and other ladies lifted Atti’s train, and the chief lady-in-waiting swept her eyes over all of them, nodded, and led the way out of the apartment towards the great hall.

And Atti was gone – gone out to her destiny, with him. Melissa could not go with her. She could only train the hair, clean and trim the nails, and see the beautiful thing she had helped to make walk itself away, surrounded by women who had never heard her cry in the night or felt her shiver under the same blanket in the mountains.

‘We can watch from the gallery,’ said one of the other servant girls. ‘No one’s going to need us before it’s over.’

That was the thing, thought Melissa – knowing when you were going to be needed. In among the running around there was beginning to be quite a bit of waiting, too, sitting on stools in small back rooms
and listening to the talk of the other servant girls with whom she had so little in common. Once she had told them all she cared to about Atti, there was hardly anything left to say. But no one was unfriendly, at least. And now they assumed she would go with them. So she did. She had never seen the court before.

She followed the others along unfamiliar, unlit corridors, knowing that if she lost them she would be lost altogether. She could hear them ahead of her, whispering to one another, giggling as someone tripped, and a mock-cry of pain as someone else stubbed her toe. She followed them left and right through the shadowy passages, hearing the distant murmur of the court swell ahead of her. She waited at the back of the group while the leading girls fumbled at a door. She saw the light crack around it as it opened, swinging away. The clamour of a crowd rose from beyond.