The Widow and the King (11 page)

And what would happen to him if they could not?

‘Walk, Stefan,’ grunted the man. They slowed. The knight was breathing heavily. The road had got steeper. Maybe he meant to run again when they got to the top. He was looking over his shoulder again. Ambrose looked around, too. He could no longer see the fire. All sounds were lost in the roaring of the falls. But he could still smell the smoke that stole among the trees.

Perhaps it was the smoke that was making his eyes blur like this.

The road curved again, and levelled. The woods opened. To his left, below the three-quarter moon, rose the flat lack shape of a high hill. To his right was what seemed to be a great sleeve of lake, running away between steep slopes. This was the way he had come yesterday, in the sunlight, hearing the falls ahead of him and thinking that at last his journey was nearly over. Now the moon rose above the darkness of Chatterfall, and the voice of the waters would never cease from weeping.

t was weeping from the sky that woke him: rain falling in a light pitter-patter. He had been aware of it for some time before his mind rose from sleep. His body ached and his head swam. He was very hungry.

He lifted his head. It was light. He was lying in a small space, open to the sky and bounded by walls of tumbled, blackened stone. Lank weeds rose from the ground about him. Stones and the ends of charred timbers peeped sullenly from among them.

Slowly his mind made sense of what he was seeing. He was inside the remains of a house. There were gaps in the wall that might once have been windows and a door. But the roof was gone, and so it wasn't a house any more. Whatever had covered its floor had gone, too. There had been fire. It must have been a big one, to scorch the stones like that. Now only the lower walls were left, providing a little shelter from the weather.

What was he doing here?

He remembered that there had been a knight in the woods above Chatterfall. He had put Ambrose on a big
horse and led him for what seemed like hours. Then they had all stopped, and the knight had told him to lie down and get some sleep.

The horse was nowhere to be seen. But the knight was a few yards away, crouching by what must have been a hearth at the foot of a ruined chimney. He had a pot on it and was beginning to feed a fire with twigs.

Food? Ambrose rose on one elbow.

The knight looked across at Ambrose. He stopped what he was doing.

Ambrose sat up with a jerk. It was
him
!

It was the man who had struck Mother on the clifftop! The one she had called a wolf !

Or was it?

Surely this knight was much older than that man had been. His hair was lighter – partly because there was grey in it. There were lines around his eyes and cheek muscles.

Yet it was the same face – the face on the man called Raymonde, who had come up the path to the house a fortnight ago: the same look, the same slanting brows.

Except that it had smiled then. It had smiled widely, and the eyes had been eager, and the mouth had been full of talk and of confidences. This knight was not smiling, and he was not speaking. He was frowning. He did not seem to like Ambrose's face any more than Ambrose liked his.

Ambrose looked at the knight and kept very still.

At last the knight cleared his throat.

‘Eat first, hey?’ he said. ‘There are old strip-fields around this place. Things growing – grain, roots; maybe olives and fruit. See if you can find us anything.’

He still did not smile, although Ambrose could tell that he was trying to sound cheerful. For the moment, Ambrose thought it best to do as he was told. So he rose stiffly, and hobbled towards what must once have been a door out of the wrecked building.

‘Keep your eyes open,’ the man said. ‘If anyone approaches, come quickly and do not call out.’

Among the things piled by the knight's saddlebag was a small, triangular shield of wood. On it was painted the head of a wolf. There was also a hand holding a bar or staff across its face, but it was clearly a wolf.

Ambrose limped out into the grey world.

The ruined house lay in low, rolling countryside, covered with scrub and a few trees. There were indeed strip-fields around it, and orchards, all overgrown. There were no berry-bushes of the kind that had fed Ambrose for most of his journey through the hills. Twenty yards away the great, grey horse was pegged on a long rope among yellow tussocks. It lifted its head and looked at him mournfully, as if to say that he would find nothing in that direction.

He thought of walking away across the brown land: of just walking and walking, as he had done for the last fortnight, and not coming back to the face by the fire behind him. But he had nowhere to go now. His feet hurt and he was weak. The knight had talked about food.

The smell of onions led him to a small kitchen garden, where he also found a few root vegetables that he did not recognize. They had gone to seed, of course, but Ambrose thought they could still be eaten. He pulled them from the earth and wandered into the orchard. There were some
fruits hanging from the trees, but most were beyond his reach. He looked among the grasses for windfalls that might be fresh, and found a few. He also found the remains of a goat, still tethered to a trunk. It was dry and flattened among the long grasses. The eyes were long gone, and the teeth showed from the ragged lips and skin. Someone had cut its neck nearly in two, and then had left it there. He did not touch it.

He brought his findings to the knight, who scowled and poked among them. The man seemed to think that Ambrose could have done much better if only he had tried, but he made no move to go and look himself. He took the onions, tore the outer leaves off them, and dropped the remains into the mix of meal and water in his pan.

Ambrose gathered the eight white stones from the ground where he had been sleeping and put them into his pouch. He wondered what he was doing here, in a wrecked house in a flat brown land where nothing useful grew. Home was gone, and Chatterfall was gone, and for the moment there was nothing but the light rain on his shoulders, and the rising hiss from the pot.

The rain poured on, ceaselessly. He huddled into the slight shelter of the wall, as close as he could get to the flames without being in the man's reach. The broth, at least, was beginning to smell good. There had been so little to eat since leaving home.

At last the knight removed the pan from the fire.

‘Well enough,’ he said.

Ambrose reached out at once, hunger rising in him like a beast. The knight struck his hand away.

‘Let it cool, you idiot,’ he said. ‘Did your mother teach you nothing?’

How could he talk about Mother?

The knight waited for an answer, then shrugged when he did not get one. After a bit he took a knife and cut up some of the windfalls Ambrose had found, throwing away the bad pieces. They ate them in silence. Then the knight picked up the pan and began to spoon the mess in it to his own lips. Ambrose watched mouthful after mouthful disappear into that sour, stubbly face. He couldn't help thinking that Mother had always served him first – unless he was being punished.

At last the man passed the pan over to him. He took the spoon, and gulped at it. It was just a porridge, flavoured with the onions, but at that moment it tasted very, very good. Ambrose felt it moving down inside him, warming him. He had not realized how cold he had become. So he ate every drop that he could spoon up, and then without being told took the pan to an old trough to wash it. He limped back to the knight, who offered him water to drink.

The rain was easing, down to a few spits from the sky.

‘What happened here?’ said Ambrose, suddenly. Food had made him bolder.

The knight looked around as though seeing the house for the first time. He pulled a face.

‘Raided,’ he said. ‘It is common enough. All this land was fought over in Tarceny's rising, ten years ago, and Baldwin's rising after that. A house like this – it is built for defence, but if you have enough force and a bit of time you can always take it.’

Ambrose thought of the fire flickering through the
trees at Chatterfall. He remembered Uncle Adam, at the door to his house; Aunt Evalia, lurching in the saddle behind him; and his mother's voice, speaking beside the pool.
All the fields are wastelands, Amba.

‘So,’ said the knight. ‘Let's see what you're carrying there.’ He held out his hand for the pouch of stones. ‘Give it,’ he said, frowning again.

Ambrose thought of refusing. But the knight snapped his fingers impatiently and held out his hand again. Reluctantly, Ambrose passed the bag over.

‘They're mine,’ he said.

‘I need them.’

The knight peered into the pouch. He did not seem interested in the stones, but after a moment he drew out the strip of paper with Mother's writing on it. He frowned at the writing.

‘That's her name, isn't it?’ He held the paper at arm's length to Ambrose, jabbing his finger at the end of the line of writing. ‘That's your mother's name.’

‘Yes,’ said Ambrose, warily.

The knight grunted, and handed the pouch to Ambrose. Ambrose was so relieved to get the stones back that for a moment he forgot about the letter. When he looked up the knight was stuffing it into his own pouch.

‘That's mine!’ said Ambrose.

‘It says who you are. I'll take care of it. Now, boy,’ he said, once again in that voice that tried to sound friendly when never a smile crossed his face. ‘I met your mother in the mountains a week ago. I'm here because she asked me to come to Chatterfall to find you. Now we know Chatterfall's gone, we need to go somewhere else. That will mean riding south …’

‘That's a
lie
!' yelled Ambrose.

The knight stopped, staring at him.

‘She's dead!’ he shouted. ‘They're all dead! You're a liar!’

‘That she is not! I saw her, a week ago. She said …’

‘Liar!’ Ambrose screamed. ‘And it's
your fault
!’

The knight looked like the man who had hit her. He was so like, he
must
have had something to do with him. And he saw how the knight's face whitened – how he glared at the words. For a moment Ambrose knew that he was right. Then …

‘I'll not be called a liar by you!’ the knight shouted.

And angrily, deliberately, the knight leaned across and cuffed Ambrose hard around the ear. Ambrose's head sang. He put his hands to the side of his face. The knight's gauntlet smacked into Ambrose's other ear, and Ambrose reeled. Through his pain he heard the man say: ‘I've not come days out of my way and business so
you
can call me names. You learn this lesson!’

Ambrose could not remember being struck before – not like this. Not at home, nor in diManey's kindly place by the waterfall. Both sides of his head throbbed, and he was fighting tears. His heart raged, helplessly, against the world and this evil man.

‘Now get up,’ the knight said. ‘Someone attacked Chatterfall last night. Whoever it was will be out looking for you. We've made smoke here. We need to move. Get yourself together.’

‘I'm still hungry,’ Ambrose mumbled defiantly.

‘If we see a whole roof today, we may get food. Otherwise there will be nothing until nightfall. Don't put your hopes up.’

The man had already turned away, and was stamping out the fire.

He had said it now.
She's dead
. He hadn't wanted to.

Saying it was like making it happen again: (her body turning in the air, bouncing outwards from the rocks with a noise like a wet sack dropping). Saying it made it real. Now the emptiness of the world was in him, as well as outside.

Oh, there were people like Aunt Evalia and Uncle Adam, who would embrace him and feed him in an afternoon, and be gone themselves before dawn. There were ill-faced knights who stole her last writing and beat him around the head. There were even berry-bushes, and as he was now learning, old strip-fields, that might provide a mouthful now and again. But they were part of the emptiness.

And all the fields were wastelands now.

The rain had lifted. The sky remained a thick, mottled grey that dulled the heart. They set off together on the horse along a path through the thorn-hills. It ran up slopes, over ridges, along valleys. Before crossing each skyline the knight checked the horse and looked back, but nothing moved behind them. Ambrose, perched once more upon a rolled blanket before the saddle, found his seat growing more and more uncomfortable. He hated the feel of the knight's arms around him. When at last the man spoke to him, he barely heard.

The man repeated himself. ‘Have you not ridden before?’

He was trying to be friendly again. But Ambrose did not want to talk to the knight. It was his fault, too.

The man grabbed his collar and jerked him backwards.

‘What's the matter with you?’ he said roughly. ‘Lost your tongue?’

Because of the way they sat, he could not force Ambrose to look at him. And Ambrose stared away across the brown heath, clamping his jaw shut. He felt the knight's anger rising, suddenly and violently, just as it had done over breakfast. He barely cared.