Unexpected Magic (44 page)

T
he soldiers marching Alex away out of the hall stopped in a large arched passage just outside. Alex gathered that someone had run after them with a message. The soldier in charge was incredulous at whatever it was the servant had said, and sent him back again to make sure. Alex kicked his heels in the passage for quite five minutes while they were running backward and forward, whispering and shrugging their shoulders. It did nothing to cool his temper, but it made him a great deal more frightened.

“I suppose they cannot decide which dungeon is deepest and darkest,” he thought. “Or perhaps they are fixing the weight of the fetters.”

He was very surprised, when he was at length marched off, to be taken up a broad and gracious flight of stairs.

“But this is only crossing to a different wing of the house,” he thought, stepping out down a long bridge-like room with windows on either side looking out on courtyards. “Like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Prisoners go over that never to return, and they say it is very beautiful.” But the soldiers went up more stairs, to heavy carved doors with a leopard ramping in stone above. One took a large key and opened the doors. Another pushed Alex inside. He heard them shut and lock the door behind him, but he was too busy staring to mind.

He was in a chain of rooms. He could see right down room after room for what seemed to him hundreds of yards, and each room was filled to the ceiling with books. It was one of the biggest libraries he had ever seen. Quite bewildered and completely awestruck, he started on the long walk down to the other end. “Millions of books,” he thought, as he went, “and they must all belong to that caterpillar.” The smell of ancient books was suffocatingly strong, the echo of his steps was muffled in books, and books breathed out a dampness which, before he had half reached the other end, was making him shiver in his shoes.

“There is a door at the other end,” he said. “Maybe they have forgotten to lock it. Perhaps there are doors hidden behind the shelves in the walls. Perhaps he had me put here to drive me mad with looking for a way out. Because I can see no reason else why he should put me here.”

The door at the other end was locked. Alex rattled it angrily, gave it a kick and turned away. Then he thought he saw the reason why he had been put there. There was a picture of the Prince propped on an easel just beside that door. It must have been very newly done, since the boy was in black in it, and it smelled of fresh paint. Alex stared at it, and the portrait's wide blue eyes stared back. Alex knew that, now he had noticed it, he would feel those painted eyes staring at him from the whole length of the great library.

“I shall not scrub your eyes out,” he told it. “That would be childish, and someone would only have to paint them in again. But I warn you that I shall turn you to the wall if you look at me like that.”

There was writing at the top of the picture. Alex bent forward to see it. “Everard IV,” he read. “Everard. That is your wretched name, is it?” Then he turned away and began to look at the books. Most of them were very old, some enormously heavy, with beautiful pictures and Gothic lettering. Almost all were Latin, and some Greek. Then he found a wall full of newer books. “Only a hundred years old or so,” he thought. He looked at some: histories of the Principality full of battles, burnings, conquests, and feuds; long romances in verse he had not the patience to read; and some books of poems. The one which most interested him of these was the poems of Humphrey Lord Tremath. It was a little like Shakespeare and almost pleasantly familiar. Alex sat down on the floor with it, trying to forget how cold he was becoming, and read it from cover to cover.

“I prefer Shakespeare,” he said, slapping it shut, and found that he had said it to a hatchet-faced serving-man who was bringing him a tray of food. Alex scrambled up. The man put down the tray, bowed, and went out of the nearest big end door.

The food was excellent, and Alex, unlike Cecilia, had a hearty meal. There was a steaming wooden bowl of jugged hare and another of something cold and white which Alex at first prodded suspiciously. It seemed to be a mixture of chicken and fish, flavored with herbs. He tried it and found it was delicious. Then there were fresh rolls and white cheese and a silver mug of beer. Alex had never had beer. He found he liked it. There was, too, a bowl of fruit. He read one of the histories while he ate. “This is not so bad,” he thought. “I could stay here for a year at least without becoming very bored—I think. Always providing they send me food.” Then he remembered his father. He lost his appetite for the big pear he had been looking forward to. “He will think we went into the quicksands,” he thought. “Just like Miss Gatly's stories. Perhaps this is what really happened to all the other people who vanished after the Wild Rider was seen.”

The idea so depressed him that he walked about, trying to avoid the portrait's eyes. He had just reached the door which he had come in by, when the door at the other end opened. Two soldiers came in, and began the long walk toward him. Alex started to meet them, but stopped. He had noticed enough about this strange country to know that these men were not in the Prince's livery, the green with mourning bands, which the men who brought him here had worn. These wore the dim blue and brown he had seen with the Count of Gairne.

“Something terrible is going to happen,” he thought.

The soldiers came up to him—there was nothing he could do to prevent them—and calmly took his arms. Then they led him out of the library, down more stairs, and out into a small courtyard somewhere at the back of the mansion. Horses were waiting there, most of them with riders in that same blue and brown livery. Alex saw that his own horse was there waiting for him, and another, a splendid gray, with a bridle all stamped with gold leopards. They took him to his horse and told him to mount. Then they all waited, and Alex, cold from the library, grew colder still with apprehension. At last Prince Everard came hurrying out wearing a long black cloak. He gave Alex a satisfied look before he mounted the splendid horse. Then someone opened a gate in the wall and they all rode out into the other end of the valley from the main gate.

“What is he doing with the wrong soldiers?” Alex wondered. “Where are we going?” It seemed to him more dignified not to fuss and ask questions. Obviously, he would find out.

They went toward the hills at the eastern side of the valley, and then up a winding path in the hills. Alex noticed, as they were all strung out on the path, that there was a courtier in black beside the Prince. He thought it was the young man who had so elegantly escorted Cecilia away. Then he looked down into the valley at the great mansion, with the red winter sun hanging over it, and wondered if he would ever see it again.

They did not go very far. After half a mile of slow riding in snowy uplands, the Prince gave the order to halt. The soldiers at once separated and rode a little way off, until Alex, the Prince, and the courteous Lord Arbard were left all together in the center of a wide ring. There was nothing in sight but snowy hills all round. Alex looked at the Prince and wondered what was going to happen.

The Prince surprised him by smiling at him. “Now,” he said, “I take it that you have little knowledge of swordsmanship.”

“No,” said Alex, mystified. “I scarcely know one end of a sword from the other.”

“And I,” said Prince Everard, “have always been poor with my fists.”

Alex realized what was going to happen. “But you can kill me with a sword,” he said angrily. “People hardly ever die in a fistfight.”

Lord Arbard suddenly spoke up. “Few, hardly ever, rarely—or at least, not at once,” he said.

“Be quiet, Hugo,” said the Prince. “I know a sword fight would be more dangerous, particularly against an Outsider, so I have been thinking of other forms of fighting wherein we might be more equally matched. Can you wrestle?”

Alex shut his mouth hard to prevent it falling open with his astonishment. He could wrestle. Wrestling was quite a sport in the countryside in those days. “Yes,” he said, “but not very well. I am too light to make a good wrestler.” And he thought: “But I shall have to try. He will win hands down, being so much bigger.”

The Prince looked him over. “I feared you would be,” he said. “And the only alternative which came to me was to fight with quarterstaves. Are you able to do that?”

“Yes,” said Alex, more than ever astonished at this boy's scrupulousness. “Yes, I can use a quarterstaff.” In fact, he rather fancied himself as a quarterstaffsman. He and Ned Gatly had almost weekly duels, and Alex won rather more often than Ned. He wished he were not so cold. One needed warm wet hands for a quarterstaff.

The Prince seemed delighted. “You agree to that, then?”

“Yes, I agree,” said Alex.

The Prince dismounted at once. Alex was down more slowly, being so cold. Lord Arbard also got off his horse, carrying two wooden staves. The Prince was undoing his cloak. Alex, rather reluctantly, threw off his cape and unbuttoned his jacket.

“Now,” said the Prince, “I shall get my own back. You will see.”

“Not if I can help it,” Alex answered and began the ritual of spitting on his hands—a very necessary ritual in the snow, he realized.

The Prince suddenly looked up angrily. “Get back, you. I ordered you to stand off.”

The soldiers were closing in on them, softly jogging nearer. There seemed two or three times the number there had been. Alex saw the Prince and Lord Arbard exchange alarmed glances and put their hands on the hilts of their swords. Then there were men and horses all round the three of them in a tight ring, and, among them, looming against the red sun, the stout, evil shape of the new Count of Gairne.

Alex stood close beside the Prince and the young lord. In an odd way, he felt on their side—certainly, he would rather be on anyone's side than the Count of Gairne's. He could tell, from the way that the Count was looking at all three of them, that the terrible thing he had been afraid of was happening at last. He wondered if he had ever been more frightened in his life. There were times when he had waited for Josiah to thrash him that he had fancied himself afraid, but they were nothing to this.

The Prince and his friend were frightened too. They gave no sign, but Alex could feel, almost smell, that they were as afraid as he was. The Prince spoke, though, firmly and clearly, as if he were only a little annoyed.

“What is this, Towerwood? You promised me to mind your own business.”

The Count laughed. “True, Your Highness, but when it came to the trial, I found I could not allow you to break your own decrees like this.”

Prince Everard put his chin up angrily, but his face was very red. “I—”

“No one,” said the Count, “is to ride out, except on the strictest business, until the New Year is a week old. You are ten days early, my lord.”

Prince Everard lost his temper, as he had done that time on the island. Alex, seeing him stamp and shake his fist, suspected that it was a thing he did fairly often. “You fat, sneaking toad! Very well, I have broken the decree, but am I not the Prince? Have I not the power to make and break every law in the land?” And so on.

The Count, while the Prince raged, shook his head, with a slow, false pitying smile. Never had Alex hated a smile more. Lord Arbard, seeing that smile, took the Prince's arm and tried to quiet him. Prince Everard flung him off and continued to shout at the Count. But soon, he too was dismayed by that pitying look. He faltered, spoke more quietly and ended up lamely saying:

“I will not be bullied in this way, Towerwood.”

Then the Count sighed and answered softly: “Ah, Your Highness, these rages of yours have been your undoing. As we have all feared, you have at last run mad. Here,” he gestured round the waiting soldiers, “here are forty witnesses to the fact.”

Alex looked around at the soldiers, and so did the Prince, in amazement. Each soldier might have been specially chosen for his hard, cruel face. They sat waiting, holding their long spears, looking down at the three young people standing in the snow, without a flicker of kindness or sympathy in any of their forty faces.

“Nonsense,” Prince Everard answered bravely, but his voice was shaking. “Go away, Towerwood. Take your men with you.”