Beyond the Burning Lands (6 page)

“And Luke,” she said, “who never changes—being neither dwarf nor girl but a Captain of the army. Being strong and brave and wise and without the tiniest bit of imagination. Lucky Luke.”

•  •  •

We sat, Peter and I, with Ann in her parlor. This was not the room my mother had used but another. It had much less of ornament and frippery and the pictures on the walls were all to do with her religion. One showed this god of theirs, a thin, melancholy man with a golden saucer behind his head, blessing his followers; while in another his body hung twisted on a wooden cross. They were a gloomy lot altogether, these Christians, and I thought it strange that Ann herself should be so warm a person.

We talked like any family group of family matters. Peter spoke of the child that was to be born. He was full of plans for him—he was certain it would be a boy—and talked almost as though he were already with us. Ann and he wrangled, though gently, about his rearing. To Peter, of course, it was necessary, indeed inevitable, that he should be trained as a warrior. Ann did not quite oppose this—how could she?—but made it plain that she would have her say in all things she thought important: which comprehended much.

I wondered what he would be like, this unborn nephew of mine. Divided between his father's demands of strictness, the iron rule a Prince must impose upon his son, and his mother's loving gentleness, would he grow into a weak vacillating man, feeble and indulgent and vicious like James of Romsey? But perhaps—and I thought it more likely—it would be their strengths, united in their love for each other, which would mold him, not their weaknesses: so making him a warrior strong yet noble-hearted, a worthy Prince to succeed a Prince.

Ann looked at the clock on the wall, dangling heavy weights, its massive wooden carapace carved with a representation of a boar hunt in which the boar at bay had tiny gleaming tusks of ivory. She said:

“I must leave you. My bath will be prepared.”

Peter said, teasing her: “I have never known such a one for baths. Every day and sometimes twice a day.”

“It is a weakness,” she said. “I could do without fine clothes, rich food, the trappings of the court, if you were to discard me, but I should miss my baths. I confess my sin of indulgence to the priest, but I cannot break myself of it.”

“Go quickly, then,” Peter said. “Take this bath, that may be your last if I decide in the morning to put you away, and take a new wife who does not make such demands on the palace stoves.”

They smiled and kissed and she left us. He and I talked, as easily but on different matters. There was the question of how the troop would get through the pass across the Burning Lands. The peddler had this cloth which protected against the heat; but there was not enough for one other man and a horse, let alone a score. I had talked about it with Edmund and Martin, and Martin had suggested something. The dwarfs could make boots for the horses, as the peddler had done, and in place of the magic cloth contrive a means of trickling water down over them from a skin fixed on the saddle bow. This would serve to keep them cool.

“Your friend Martin has a good head,” Peter said. “He is wasted as an Acolyte. But I suppose he would not anyway have been a warrior.”

“He will fight when there is need. He fought for me in the Contest.”

“And was soon down.”

“Not until the second round. He brought his man down in the first.”

Peter grinned. “You are loyal to your followers and I am glad of it. Let us talk of the campaign next summer. I would like you to tell me what you think of a scheme I have in mind. . . .”

I do not know how long we talked. It was Peter who broke off. He said:

“She soaks more each day. She will turn into a water nymph or give me a son with webbed feet.” He made a quick gesture of contrition to the Spirits, repudiating his levity and warding off the evil thought. “We will send a maid to hurry her.”

He reached for the bell rope and pulled it.

•  •  •

It was Janet who attended his call, she who wore her dress very high at the neck to cover the marks the Spirits had left on her polymuf body. My mother had been bullied by her servants and my Aunt Mary had bullied hers. Ann asked little and in a quiet voice, but they did her bidding almost before she could speak the request.

Janet nodded and went. When she returned a few minutes later and stood in the doorway, Peter was talking of maneuvers. Without looking up, he said:

“Well, did you tell her we were waiting? It is almost time for supper.”

He had not, as I had, seen Janet's face, stricken and bloodless. She said:

“Sire . . .”

It was her voice, broken and failing, which made him turn to her and then, running forward, catch her by the shoulders. I saw his fingers tighten and her face twist with pain.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Tell me, girl!”

She dropped her head. The words were very faint, but one heard them.

“She is dead, sire.”

K
ERMIT SAID: “SHE DROWNED, SIRE
. That is all.”

He was palace surgeon, and had held this office as far back as the reign of Prince Egbert, Stephen's father. He was tall and thin with a face like an egg, having a fuzz of white whiskers at the bottom of the oval and a thinner matching fuzz at the top. He had two younger surgeons to assist him and treated them with contempt. His pronouncements were usually brief and always final.

My brother said: “But
how
drowned?”

“She was in her bath, and alone. She fainted, one must suppose, and slipped beneath the water.”

“She was young, healthy. Why should she faint? Can you be certain she was not poisoned with some drug?”

“She drowned,” Kermit repeated. “If she had felt illness, a pain, she had a maid within call, in the next room. She could have been at her side in a moment.”

Peter said bitterly: “She should have been with her, not in another room.”

“That is so,” Kermit said, “but it was not permitted. It is known your Lady had strange scruples.”

He was speaking of that extreme modesty of the body which all the Christians had. The women wore long enveloping gowns. Ann had refused to have maids attend her in her dressing even.

Peter groaned, his whole body shaking. “If I had known . . . !”

Kermit said: “You asked, why should she faint? When a woman is with child she may have spells of dizziness. If she lies long in hot water it may be more likely.”

Peter stared at him, hot eyed. “Why did you not prevent her, knowing that?”

“Prevent? I advised against too much bathing. You have heard me. She did not listen.”

“You did not tell me there was danger to her.”

Kermit shrugged. “There is always danger in ignoring a surgeon's words. But no harm would have come had she kept her maid beside her.”

Peter was silent. He looked as though he fought against something in himself: an impulse, perhaps, to strike down this creaking old man who showed more pride than pity. Kermit asked at last:

“Is there anything further I can do, sire?”

“Can you bring her back to life?” Kermit looked at him but did not answer. “Then go!”

He went stiffly, his dignity ruffled by the brusqueness of the dismissal. Peter and I were left alone. He shook his head from side to side and his face was creased with naked pain. He said:

“Luke, how did it happen?”

“I do not like the man,” I said, “but it must have been as he says.”

“If someone came in . . . and found her there defenseless. An assassin could have held her head beneath the water—so easy a thing.”

“Came in from where?” I asked. “Beneath the window there is a drop of fifty feet, and a guard patrolling at the bottom. The maid was in the next room and beyond that there is the corridor and another guard. There is no way for a man to come in. And if he got in, how could he get out again?”

“The maid might have been bribed. I could have her put to torture.”

“You could,” I said. “But the maid was Gerda, who for years served your mother and tended you as a boy.”

And who came to me, I could have added, when that mother lay under sentence of death, begging me to visit her so that she in turn could plead with me to intercede for her son.

Peter banged a fist against his head. “I think I am going mad. . . . To talk of torture—what would she think of it? But I am tormented with miseries and hates. I almost hate her, whom I loved and love. That she should have been so careless of herself: she had no right!”

I had a feeling he would have liked me to go to him, to embrace him. I could not do it. The news had shocked me as much as it had him, but there were differences in our minds. There were things I could not help thinking of, however hard I tried to put them away.

“I made a jest of it. They were my last words to her.” He squeezed his eyes shut and tears ran from their corners. “If I could but call them back!”

•  •  •

She was buried with Christian rites. There were murmurings about this, though not in Peter's presence. At her funeral there was no Seer, no Acolytes, no solemn procession to the Seance Hall with the casket in a carriage drawn by black horses, purple garlanded, and everyone, nobility and commoners, dwarfs and polymufs, following on foot to do her reverence. Instead her coffin was taken on a simple cart, drawn by one old piebald horse, to the North Gate, and so out to the patch of ground where the Christians buried their dead. The Christians went with her, and Peter and I, but he would have no others. The ground was hard with frost: they had been forced to use low braziers to thaw it, inch by inch, so that they could dig. We stood by the grave and the priest spoke the ceremonial. A sharp wind blew along the foot of the walls, lifting a fine powder of snow, and they listened with chattering teeth. Few of them, since they were all so poor, had cloaks that would keep out the cold. Standing there, chill myself in my Captain's topcoat, I heard but did not heed. I was full of thoughts which turned round and round in my head, dizzy and frightening.

•  •  •

This was the second time within a few years that the Prince's Lady had died in winter, and although this time there was no ugliness of murder the gloom that settled on the palace and city was scarcely less deep. Unlike my father my brother, at the outset, looked for my company. He would spend hours talking to me of Ann, repeating over and over small things, anecdotes from the life they had shared. But whereas it had hurt me that my father withdrew into a private sorrow, strangely I did not welcome this talk, and found myself slow and awkward in response.

Sometimes the Christian priest was with us. He was a weak-looking man, small in stature and with a stoop that at times gave him a look of one of those polymufs who carry a second back upon the first. As though in copy of the Seers his head was shaved, apart from a thin circle of hair round the base of his skull, and he wore black like the Seers also but in a garment more resembling a woman's.

His voice, though, was strong if his body was weak. He talked in deep tones and was never lost for words. He was always on about this god of theirs, and there were some tales that even I found worth listening to. It seems that when soldiers were sent to arrest him, one of his men very rightly drew his sword and sliced an ear off one of the guards. But the man-god rebuked his follower, saying: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” What I could not understand was what was wrong with a sword death. Was it not a better end than dying starving in a ditch, as many of these Christians looked like doing? I thought of asking the priest that, but then thought it would only bring on another flood of words and did not.

He consoled Peter, as Ezzard had done my father, by declaring that he and Ann would meet in a better world than this. Ezzard had been able to further the deception with the machine through which my mother's living voice had been captured on a moving tape, to be heard again in the darkness of the Seance Hall. The priest had no such aid, but he did well enough with words.

And I, for my part, sickened of them, and of the black atmosphere which I could do nothing to lift and which roused troubling feelings in me: even a sense, although I knew it was absurd, of guilt. I withdrew more and more from my brother's presence and he, listening to the priest, seemed not to mind. The winter wore on, with blizzards and biting cold that froze the snow in the streets into ridges which the polymufs could not shift. It seemed that it would last forever, continuing day after bitter day.

Then in a night the weather changed. I awoke to rain drumming against my window. It fell all morning, carried on a wind from the west that seemed almost warm after the northeasterlies we had endured, and long after it had stopped water dripped from the eaves as the last of the icicles melted.

Within days the trees were budding. The small green spears had a look of impatience to them, of bursting out from restraint. I felt the same urge to be free of things that bound me. I found Peter alone, without the priest, and said:

“We must talk about the summer's campaign.”

He shook his head. “There will be none.”

“Why?”

“She hated war, as you know.”

“She was a Christian. You are not.”

“But I will not lead out the army in the year in which she died. Next year, perhaps.”

I saw he would not budge. But it was unendurable to contemplate a summer penned in the city with this grieving man. I had hoped the fighting would work a change in both of us. If it was not to be I must find some other way. I said:

“The embassy still goes north, across the Burning Lands?”

He said indifferently: “I suppose so.”

“I asked you once before for permission to go with it. I make the same request now.”