The Widow and the King (47 page)

Aun got up, slowly, and looked around. He stooped to pick up the hand-and-a-half sword.

‘He could swing it well enough,’ he said, panting. ‘But he jumped the same way twice, and I knew he would. All I had to do was send him into his fellow's legs.’

The oak-pommel blade still dangled from his right hand, all bloody at the point. He lifted the hand-and-ahalf sword in his left and looked at it.

‘Pretty thing. Would have done for me if he had thought about his feet.’

(
Pretty shot, though. Smack, into the heart. I could do the same for you
.)

Ambrose looked around.

A ring of people surrounded them, townsfolk with women and children among them. They were all still, staring at the fallen man as if something terrible had happened. The fighter Aun had felled earlier was on his hands and knees, still with his head hanging as if he could not clear it from the blow. The other man was kneeling beside his fallen leader, uselessly unlacing the bloody helm. Ambrose looked away. He did not want to see the face of the dead knight.

At the roadside was the row of empty stocks, and in the last two the men that Ambrose had been trying to free when the Helm appeared. They stood with their backs bent and their heads and hands pinned by the boards as if nothing had happened on the road before them that morning.

He looked hard among the horrified faces of the crowd. He looked among the trees. He was looking for the Heron Man. He did not consider the small, triangle-sailed boat that was nosing into the bay.

‘Stupid to end your life,’ said Wastelands, ‘on a mistake like that.’

Sophia thought she would have made a good spy. She did not ask questions as she strolled among the huts of Aclete looking for someone to sell her a few supplies. She took her time, and accepted water or ale at this door or that, teased the younger children who came to look at the strange woman from over the water, and let people talk to
her about what was on their minds. They wanted to talk – mostly about the fight that had taken place that morning outside the gate, when they had lost their lord. Now the town was leaderless. No one knew whether the armed men he had gathered about him would stay or go. No one knew if the men who had killed him would make themselves lords in his place. Someone said they were in league with a band of brigands who lived deeper in the March, who would surely come the moment they heard the news. Half the men in the town had gone off to a meeting with the new lords at the top of the big hill.

She made her way back to the bay, swinging her little sack of purchases as she went. There were not too many, for Chawlin's purse was getting slim. They needed more coin. She did not know how far it was to Hayley, and whether they would do better to sell the boat now, so that they could buy more provisions for their journey, or whether they should keep the boat so that they could travel faster up the lake. She plotted in her mind a conversation with some of the fishermen that could lead to her selling the boat for something approaching the price Chawlin had paid for it. The important thing, she knew as surely as if her mother had told her, was that she should not seem too interested in a sale. Someone else was going to have to ask about the boat first. Of course, no one who was interested in buying would make it so easy for her. So, said the ghost of her mother in her mind, she needed someone who was not buying themselves, but who knew someone who might, and would suggest it to both sides. The Widow had been good at these things – whether on the grand scale of politics or the smaller one of running the household. Sophia could see that now.

She was humming a tune as she walked. It was the slow, sad hill-song that Chawlin had taught her. She knew it was a lament, but she wanted to sing, and she wanted to sing this song because it was his.

It was good to be on land. She had not always felt safe in the small boat, caught in a big wind on the waters, and she had quickly grown tired of its cramped boards and the long, long waiting while it ploughed away at the waves. At least the two days spent sailing up past the changing hillsides of the March had been better than the first, endless reach over empty waters. Even so, time had gone very slowly until at last one in the line of hills above the shore had swelled into the shape of the great flat-topped knoll above the town, to guide Chawlin to the harbour that he had remembered. And now they were landed and there were still hours left of the day.

She found Chawlin sitting with his back against the seaward wall of the big wooden house, screened from sight from the rest of the town. He had the cup on his knees and did not look up as she approached. She knew that he did not mean to let it seem that he had no time for her, but she wished that he would at least smile. And it wasn't doing him any good, that cup. His face was drawn.

‘I've news,’ she said.

‘That's more than I have.’

‘Is it safe to do that here?’

He looked around him.

‘The building is empty,’ he said. ‘It used to be the chief house in this place. A woman lived in it. She was clever. She fooled me badly, once. But she's gone now: fled when the troubles came. Now they are using it as a storehouse. The guard is off somewhere today.’

‘Up the hill,’ she said. ‘Most of the men have gone up the hill. There's a council going on there.’

‘Ah. Is that what I've been seeing? It's been difficult. It's like trying to look at something that's always in the blind spot of your eye. And Luke must be in the middle of it.’

‘Ambrose. They say he is.’

Chawlin drew breath.

‘Close, then. Now I need to think,’ he said.

‘Why?’

I need to think.
He said that a lot. Sophia did not see what there was to think about. They should climb the hill and wait for a chance to speak to Ambrose. It would not be easy, what she had to say. But that was her problem, and not his. And after that they could be on their way. Chawlin was talking as though this was something huge and impossible – or something that he really, really did not want to do. Why … ?

There! He was off again, looking into that damned cup.

‘It's changed,’ he said.

She wanted him to talk with her. She wanted to tell him how clever she had been among the huts (after all, she had found out things that the cup could not show him!). She wanted to talk about Ambrose. She wanted to talk about selling the boat. But she forced herself to be interested.

‘What can you see?’

‘It's a room. A big one. It's in a castle or a rich house. There are candles lit, so it must be night. There's a bed with a man in it. What … ?’

Sophia waited.

‘Why's it showing me this? It's not done this before.’

‘If it's at night, it can't be happening now,’ said Sophia. And if it wasn't happening now, she did not see what help it could be.

‘No … Maybe it was last night, or a few nights ago.’ He watched the water for a while in silence. Then he said: ‘I don't like this.’

‘Why not?’

‘He's got no one with him. He's … There's something coming. I can feel it. Why's it showing this?’

‘What's coming?’

Chawlin was cursing, softly, to himself.

‘
What's
coming, Chawlin?’

‘I've seen this before … Is it this? In Tarceny. But I was there – I can't see me! What's this? Who is it?’

‘Chawlin …’

‘Wake up. Wake up, damn you!’ He put his hands on the rim of the cup and shook it slightly, in his attempt to make whoever it was hear him. ‘Come on!’

They must have come then. Whoever they were. He was dumb, pale-cheeked, staring into the opaque water. For a moment Sophia saw him try to look away, gasping. Then his eyes dragged him back to the bowl. His hand came up, cupped to shield his sight, but it stopped. The water had him.

‘Chawlin, you're frightening me! What is it?’

His mouth moved, wordless. Then his eyes narrowed and his face hardened. He was watching something obscene – for long seconds.

‘Chawlin!’

‘That's – that's his arm. And that's a hand …’

She reached out and put her own hand over the bowl. He stared at it for a moment, as though it was something worse than anything he had seen in the cup. Then, painfully, he lifted his eyes.

‘They tore him,’ he said. ‘Like Tarceny.’

‘Who?’

‘It was Velis. It was the King. And they tore him to pieces.’

ow let the Lord of Tarceny speak,’ said one of the townsmen.

For the third time that afternoon Ambrose rose to face the ring of men on the hilltop. As he did so, Aun caught him by the arm.

‘This time remember, don't be clever,’ he murmured. ‘Just tell them what they've decided. Then it will stick when you've gone – or when I'm not here to back you up.’

Ambrose picked up his ragged banner and held it in his left hand, like a king's sceptre. The ghost of Denke reminded him to take a breath before he spoke, and to touch his heart with his right hand.

‘Before the man Mar came to be ruler in Aclete,’ he began, as though reciting a lesson, ‘one of the boats in the bay belonged to Ham Graysson. Three boats belonged to Penn Cable.’ He nodded to the tall, sparse-haired villager who stood among the crowd to his left. He had to get the details right. In the last case they had put to him, about the goat-flock, he had muddled them, and then he had made things worse by trying to invent a way out. The judgement had been argued over three times
until one of the older townsmen had managed to bring it to an agreement.

‘Mar seized all the boats for himself, unjustly.’ It helped if he described everything the Helm had done as wicked. Everyone else seemed ready to do so.

‘Then he leased the boats back to their owners, demanding a share of one fifth of their catch and trade in return.

‘When the boat of Ham Graysson was lost by mischance, Mar put him to work on one of the boats that had belonged to Penn Cable, increasing the share that he demanded to pay for the lost boat. Penn Cable received nothing from Mar for this. Yet Ham Graysson has now paid to Mar one third of the value of the boat that he had lost.’ Ambrose paused. Some had said one half, some one third, some a quarter. No one argued with him.

‘Ham Graysson must have a boat to win his living. Penn Cable must have some good for the injustice done to him. Therefore Ham Graysson shall keep the boat, and shall pay to Penn Cable one fifth of all his catch and trade for …’ He hesitated.

‘A year,’ said a grey-bearded townsman.

‘One year?’ muttered Cable, incredulously.

‘Ten, more like.’

‘Two …’

‘For two years,’ said Ambrose firmly. ‘After which no more shall be paid.’

‘That is the judgement,’ said Aun, because Ambrose had forgotten.

The murmur of voices rose around the ring. Penn Cable was shaking his head, as if he could not believe it;
but he was keeping silent and the crowd seemed to think the case was settled.

Ambrose looked around.

‘Is there anything more?’

They had done the foodstores and hides, the herd (which had taken hours), and now the boats. An air of exhaustion hung over the gathering. Yet the Helm must have made hundreds of judgements in his years at Aclete. Any might be disputed now; and Ambrose knew that he would have to go on and on listening to people as long as they brought their quarrels to him.

‘Enough for today, your lordship, I think,’ said the grey-bearded townsman.

Ambrose sagged inwardly with relief. He hoped it did not show. He wondered what they all thought about how he had done.

Voices rose. The circle began to dissolve. Someone laughed. Someone else was calling out about some butts of wine down in the storehouse that could be opened (now,
they
hadn't been mentioned in all that wrangling over the grain and the hides). They seemed happy, for the most part: happy at the end of a day in which they had lost their lord.

‘Will you be lodging with us in the town, sir?’ said the greybeard.

Ambrose shook his head.

‘No?’ said Aun, surprised.

‘We'd be pleased to offer you our best, sir – food and bed and wine.’

‘No. We sleep here.’ It was the one decision he had taken by himself all afternoon, and he felt quite firm about it.

Up here, on this big-shouldered hill, he stood in the light. It would last an hour more, maybe – a weak, liquid gold already welling with the cool of evening. Down below, and far out across the lake, the falling sun had left the land in shadow. And down there, by the huts, Mar had died, and the air had whispered of the enemy he could not reach. He did not want to go back down there. He wanted to remain on his island of light, as long as it lasted.

The greybeard looked nonplussed; but he shrugged.

‘It's played its part for your family, this hill, sir. Your mother and father were married on it. And your first ancestor, sir. He waited for his bride here. That's why it's called Talifer's Knoll, after him.’

‘Is it?’ said Aun. ‘Well don't let your young maids get ideas about their lord tonight. I'll be waiting with the flat of my sword for any that do.’

‘No sir,’ said the man, laughing wickedly as he turned away. ‘We'll keep ‘em under lock and key, right enough.’