The Fatal Child Read online

  ‘Shall my lady hunt through the ditches of the land and send to Tuscolo every ragged prophet she finds?’ growled the marshal. ‘Is all the blood that Develin has spilled for you mute beside these hedge-whispers? This man is not in Develin’s country, but in the March of Tarceny – beyond our reach and, I suppose, beyond even yours, Your Majesty.

  ‘And permit me to say another thing about kings, Sire, since I have seen more than one. A king must beware, yes. Always. But if he looks too hard for enemies then he may find enemies indeed. And not only in his own head!’

  The two men glared at one another. Then the King shrugged a shoulder.

  ‘If you say so, Marshal. I am not going to make enemies today. That and marriage can wait for another time.’

  And he turned. Putting his hand on an awning pole, he went back to staring at the sea.

  The sun was sinking to the water, spreading its light in a great flare of gold. The last of the sea breeze sighed in the tent-ropes. No one spoke. The marshal frowned over the chessboard. He tried a few moves of the King’s pieces, shaking his head and replacing each in turn. The King ignored him. Padry watched them both. At length he coughed, signed to one of the clerks to bring him a scroll, and unrolled it. ‘The terms of surrender, Your Majesty. The city has agreed to pay a fine of fifteen thousand in silver—’

  ‘So little?’ interjected the marshal. ‘Must my men go unpaid on their march home? Unfed, too?’

  ‘As to the feeding of them,’ said Padry, ‘the city has undertaken to provide—’

  ‘It is well, Marshal,’ said the King, still standing with his back to them. ‘It is well.’

  For a moment Padry and the marshal waited, thinking that he would add some order or correction. They could hear him murmuring as he stood and stared at the sunset. But he was not speaking to them. Padry recognized the opening verses of The Tale of Kings.

  ‘So Wulfram came over the sea,’ chanted the young man softly.

  ‘With three ships, four Angels, seven sons and one thing.

  ‘And the thing was Iron …’

  And iron in the hands of men, thought Padry, had never brought the Kingdom peace.

  III

  The Woman of Develin

  elissa always remembered the day the King came.

  She was about six, then. Dadda was out somewhere in the great woods that surrounded their clearing. She was sitting in the hut, cleaning the pot. And Mam rushed in, frightened. Someone was coming up the path.

  Melissa wanted to run and see who it was. (Anything was better than cleaning the pot!) But Mam hushed her and dropped the shutters. They sat quite still in the dark of the hut, holding each other, listening to the hooves and pretending that they were not there.

  Then a fist banged hard on the boarded window. Mam decided that it was better to open after all.

  There were two of them: an old man who rode a huge horse and wore a coat of metal rings, and a tall, dark-haired boy of about thirteen on a mule. The old man had a sour face and Melissa did not like him. The boy was different. He spoke cheerfully to Mam and politely to Dadda when Dadda came home that evening. Melissa watched him all through the meal that they shared together. Afterwards she realized that the two visitors were going to sleep with them in the hut that night. It was something that had never happened before.

  Melissa was put to bed against a wall, not in her normal place near the hearth. Mam and Dadda and the old knight lay down, too, and went to sleep. Melissa did not sleep. She lay awake, still watching the boy sitting by the fire.

  He had traded with Mam for a black cloth, which was Melissa’s shawl, and a pale cloth that had once been a sleeve of Dadda’s. Using a knife and working by the light of the flames, he cut first the shawl and then the old sleeve into shapes. Then he took a needle and thread that Mam had given him and slowly stitched a piece of the pale cloth to the black. As the fire sank Melissa watched him bend lower and lower over the cloth to see what he was doing. At last he reached over and put two more logs on the hearth to give him light. When he turned back to his work he found he had lost his needle. He sighed and fumbled for it in the darkness.

  ‘It’s by your foot,’ Melissa whispered to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s by your foot.’ She had never spoken to a stranger before.

  He found it and said, ‘Thank you.’ Then he went on working in the firelight and she went on watching him.

  His face was long and his dark hair fell down over his ears almost to his jawbone. His cheeks were smooth and his brows arched over careful eyes. He was frowning a little, peering at what he was doing as though it were somehow very, very important. Now and again he would look up and see her watching him. Then he would smile – a quick smile at the corners of his mouth. From time to time he stopped and looked thoughtfully at the shadows as if they held things she could not see.

  When he had finished he held up the black cloth in his hands. In the red-brown light of the embers Melissa saw that he had stitched the pale cloth into the centre of it. The pale cloth was a circle, but the circle was not whole.

  ‘There’s a piece missing,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, there’s supposed to be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the moon,’ he said. ‘You are looking at the moon on a dark night. But there’s something between you and it, so you can’t see all of it. That’s what the black bit means. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ll think about it.’ He smiled again. ‘You should go to sleep now.’

  In the morning the two visitors rode away together. The boy carried the black cloth tied to a stick that he slung from his shoulder. Mam and Dadda looked hard at it. Afterwards they told her that it had been a flag. It meant that the boy was the Lord of the March.

  ‘What’s the March?’ Melissa had asked.

  ‘It’s the land, my lovely. Where we live and all around us.’

  ‘And over the hill, too?’

  Mam laughed. ‘Much, much more than that. All the way to the lake, and north and south as far as the lake runs. And if he’s Lord of the March, he should be the King, too! And that means lord of all the land on the far side of the lake as well!’

  Melissa had heard of the lake but had never seen it. She could not imagine that there was even more land on the other side of it.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t go there,’ she said. ‘I want him to stay with us.’

  Dadda snorted.

  ‘It’s a fair wish,’ Mam told him. ‘If only he’ll keep the peace and make us safe.’

  ‘Lords bring taxes and trouble,’ said Dadda. ‘Here, we stand on our own feet.’

  Some time later – it may have been months, or a year – Melissa and her mother were outside the hut one evening. Mam was on her hands and knees by the fire. She had got the little flame going and was carefully putting the smaller twigs into place around it.

  Melissa asked, ‘Why isn’t Dadda a king?’

  Mam looked up and laughed. ‘But he is, my lovely! King of the clearing, the stream and the woods on either side. And I’m his queen and you’re his princess.’

  ‘I mean a real king,’ Melissa said crossly.

  ‘Oh, but he would not want that! The woods are what he loves. Keep going, sweetheart, or it’ll never be done.’

  Melissa had the basin on her knees and the millstone in her hand. She was grinding at the cornmeal to break it down into flour. It was hard work for her, and also boring, and she could only hear or draw breath to speak when she took a rest.

  ‘But don’t you want him to be one?’ she asked a minute later.

  Mam looked at her sideways. ‘A man’s no good if he’s not happy, now, is he?’ she said.

  ‘He’d have all that land and a crown. Wouldn’t that make him happy? And you?’

  ‘No, my lovely. I can’t make him what he’s not. And I can’t be what I’m not either. He’s my stoat and I’m his blackbird. That’s the way we are.’

  The answer annoyed Melissa. Of course Dadda was lithe and br
own and silent, and very clever at catching small game in the woods. But it was silly to say that he was a stoat. He wasn’t a stoat any more than he was a king. Anyway, stoats didn’t marry blackbirds. Melissa had slept in the same room as her father and mother all her life. She knew what man and wife got up to in the night. The only thing a stoat could do with a blackbird was eat it.

  ‘What am I, then?’ she asked grumpily.

  ‘Whatever you want to be. But always our lovely.’

  Across the clearing the huge shapes of the forest were grey-blue and cloudy in the evening. Dadda was out there still. At this time he might be checking his snares. The moon, pale and silver, was rising over the leafy hillside. Melissa looked up as it began its climb into the sky. The fire hissed and the sweet smoke drifted in the air.

  Mam was watching her. Her eye was as bright as a little bird’s and there was music when she laughed. ‘Can’t touch the moon, can you?’

  ‘No,’ said Melissa. ‘But I can see it.’

  ‘Can’t feel it, though. Not warm enough, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look.’

  Carefully Mam drew one of the longer sticks out of the fire. She held it pointing down so that the flames at its tip could lick up along the unburned wood. She put the palm of her other hand near the glowing end.

  ‘You can feel that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Melissa, copying her.

  ‘It’s not big, like the moon. It doesn’t shine all over everywhere. But you find it, you keep it close, it’ll warm you like the moon never could. And give you a little light, too, maybe.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Melissa.

  ‘That’s what you’ve got to do,’ said Mam.

  ‘Yes,’ said Melissa again.

  But she did not stop thinking about the King. In her daydreams he would come by again and she would speak with him properly, because she was older now (by a year, by two years, three …). She remembered how he had smiled at her. His smile had said a lot in a very little. It had told her that although he had many, many things to think about, he also had time to think about her. She thought how he might smile at her again and ask her what she was doing. And then she would take extra care with whatever it was (whether it was sweeping, or gathering wood, or milling corn), just in case he did come at that moment, riding up with the old knight at his side.

  Mam often said she was a good girl.

  The seasons passed, one after another. He did not come. But Melissa beamed and hugged Mam and Dadda with delight when baby Clara came instead. Then she ran out and hugged the goats and told them about her new sister. And that winter she helped Mam with the long, hopeless battle to keep poor Clara alive when the chill had got into the baby’s lungs. She took her turn to hold Clara as the little thing coughed and coughed into the nights. Mam did not think Clara would live and neither did Melissa, because there had been a baby before, baby Penni, and Penni had not lived either. And Clara did not. At the end Melissa and Mam sat and held what was left between them for a long, long hour after Clara had ceased to stir. Then Mam silently prised the body from Melissa, kissed her on the forehead and took the thing away.

  Dadda fished, cut wood, hunted. The three of them all worked together over the strips of crops that grew in their clearing. Melissa toiled day in, day out. In the autumns she might spend whole days out in the woods picking nuts and berries, but she never went further from the clearing than that.

  People did come by – mostly hunters, or the men from families up or down the stream. Father would speak with them and learn about things that were happening elsewhere in the March, or maybe on the lake. Once or twice the passers-by were hill people. These were the little folk with narrow, bird-like faces who came down from the mountains to trade for things like buckles and knives that they did not make for themselves. They always looked hungry and spoke few words that Melissa could understand. She was sorry for them. She was sorrier still if Dadda sent them away without making a trade. But the goods of the hill-men were often poor. There was no point giving away things that were needed if there was nothing to be had in return. Besides, Dadda said, the hill folk were heathen. They did not believe in the Angels.

  And one day in the summer of her thirteenth year, when she was gathering yet more firewood under the trees, she heard noises down in the clearing. She picked up her bundle and hurried down the slope to see who had come. As she rounded the back of the hut she heard Mother call to her anxiously. But she ran on.

  On the far bank of the stream were two men on horses.

  Two knights!

  They were not the King and his friend. Not even after all this time. They were two grown men, wearing red cloth over their armour. One of them had a big yellow beard.

  Dadda was standing on this side of the stream. He had been cutting hay. Now he was holding his long hayfork in both hands, pointed towards the newcomers. They were talking to him and he was answering. Melissa could not hear what was said. She thought the bearded knight was trying to sound friendly, but it was not the sort of friendliness she liked. Dadda, when he answered, did not sound friendly at all.

  One of the knights stirred his mount and rode it into the stream. Dadda shouted and pointed his fork at the animal. He looked as if he would stab it if it came within reach. The knight stopped, rested his arms on his horse’s neck and smiled. Dadda did not move. The points of his fork were sharp and bright. They wavered just slightly as he gripped the shaft, like twigs stirred in a light wind. The water frothed around the legs of the horse and whirled away downriver.

  The bearded knight said something. The other knight turned his horse to climb back out of the stream. Together they rode away. Dadda watched them go, all the way to the cover of the trees. At the very edge of the wood one of the knights looked round and waved cheerfully at him.

  ‘Be back.’ The words carried faintly to Melissa’s ears.

  Dadda was angry that night. He frowned and tore at his bread over supper, saying nothing. Mam, too, was tight-lipped. Melissa knew better than to ask who the knights had been or what they had wanted. Neither of her parents paid her any attention. At length Mam murmured something to Dadda. He snorted.

  ‘I don’t need ’em. I stand on my two feet.’

  ‘What if they do come back, then?’ Mam asked.

  ‘They won’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll have their hides if they do.’

  But they did.

  Two years after the fall of Velis, and on the most desperate mission of his life, Padry the chancellor returned at last to Develin.

  It was a strange feeling, rather terrible indeed, to ride up the river road and see the long white line of the outer wall and the buildings around the upper courtyard, as if nothing had changed in all that time. In the old days he had made many homecomings like this, returning from Jent or Pemini or Tuscolo with new books for the Widow’s library or new scholars for her school. Now he came with the sun banner of Gueronius over his head, six men-at-arms at his back and the seal of the lord chancellor in his pouch. And before him was Develin, just as it had been, just as if his fellow masters – Pantethon, Grismonde, Denke and the rest of them – would be there to greet him as he rode into the courtyard, and the old Widow herself still waiting for him on her throne.

  The red-and-white banners flew over the gates. The guards wore the same checked red-and-white tabards and they sounded the gate-horns in the same way. But the faces were different. Padry looked into the eyes of the gate-sergeants who asked him gruffly what his business was. They were strangers. The men he had known had perished in the sack seven years before. So had almost everyone else.

  The Widow they had killed in this very courtyard, he thought as he dismounted at last in the upper bailey. Grismonde, white-bearded Grismonde, they had cut down at his altar in the chapel over there. Denke had thrown himself from his own window as they had broken down his door. Pantethon? He had a mental image of Pantethon lying somewhere, with his favourite peacock-blue-and-gold doublet all soaked in his own bl
ood. He could not remember where it had been. The scholars, the servants, the officers of the house, even the animals …

  The courtyard was busy. There were scholars, servants, animals, all doing as they always had done in this place. They were not the ones he had known.

  The keep and the hall towered over him. Their outlines were familiar, yet at once he was aware of changes that were both subtle and real. The old hall roof had sagged in two places. Now it did not. And the tiles, though weathered, were no longer the old dingy brown that he remembered. All that side of the upper courtyard had been burned in the sack. The roof had been replaced since. Presumably the floors of the living quarters had been, too.

  The school was unchanged – a plain rectangular building, jutting into the courtyard. At his back rose the Wool Tower, also unchanged. There, in the big guardroom chimney, he had hung for hours with his eyes weeping from the faint fumes and his heart jumping every time someone entered the room below. His muscles and fingers had screamed to be released, until all his world had shrunk to the simple, agonizing battle between body and mind. Even now, looking up at the blunt circular shape of the tower, he imagined that he could still feel those pains: the torture of Develin, and the torture of Thomas Padry as he hung in the soot.

  Sweating, he wiped his brow on his sleeve. His memories disturbed him. At the same time the thought of his mission gnawed at him. He was agitated, more than he should be.

  ‘Tell your mistress that the King’s lord chancellor begs for an audience as soon as may be,’ he huffed to the gate-guard.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now, man. At the run!’ He turned to his escort. ‘Go to the stables. Find us fresh horses. You may drink and unbuckle, but be ready to ride again as soon as I appear.’