Lady of Magick (24 page)

Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Sophie had ceased staring out of the window, and turned minutely towards the conversation; there was a listening quality to her silence now, which had not been there before.

“The University,” said Powell, slowly, “is under the personal patronage of Donald MacNeill, and of Clan MacNeill as present holder of the chieftain's seat in Alba, but it also functions as a sort of quasi-independent clan-land—you do understand clans and clan-lands?”

“Yes,” Gray repeated, more truthfully this time.

Powell nodded. “So: The University is in many respects its own clan, and its own clan-land, with the Chancellor as its chieftain, if you like; and thanks to the patronage of Clan MacNeill, and to the circumstances of its founding by Ailpín Drostan, in the first days of the Kingdom of Alba, it can act on its own behalf to grant admission to lecturers, fellows, and students from abroad—subject always to the will of Donald MacNeill, of course,” he added conscientiously. “In this it is very different from, say, Merlin College, which may accept applicants, or invite guest lecturers, from outside the Kingdom of Britain but has no power to secure or even influence their admission to the kingdom itself.”

Gray frowned. “I do not perfectly understand the distinction,” he said. Nor did he understand what had led Powell to broach this subject to begin with, but it had caught his interest now, in spite of himself. “If Donald MacNeill can override the decision of the Chancellor . . .”

“Ah.” Powell held up an admonitory finger, looking for a moment exactly like the teaching fellow whom all of Merlin had expected him to become. “Any of the Colleges at Oxford, in such a case, must seek permission from the Crown, and obtain letters of passage in the prospective visitor's name.” Gray nodded his understanding, and Powell went on: “The University in Din Edin, on the other hand, may—as you have seen—issue such letters on its own behalf, without reference to what I shall for convenience call the Crown of Alba. The Crown may order the expulsion of a person to whom the University has granted entry, provided that it can show just cause for so doing—that is to say, some grounds such as a history of criminality, which render him undesirable.”

There must be some reason for this very decided turn of the conversation, but Gray could not for the life of him make it out.

“This also means,” said Powell, “that the University has more power than Merlin College, to protect its own, but that power is nonetheless finite. For example, should a visitor's own sovereign demand his extradition, the University may refuse it—as Merlin, of course, could not—but such refusal may be overruled by the Crown.”

Ah.
“Yes,” said Gray, firmly. “I understand perfectly.”

Had Courcy dispatched Powell with instructions to read them this lecture along the way? Or had Powell conceived the idea himself? In any event he now seemed satisfied, and allowed a pensive silence to reign for the brief remainder of the journey.

*   *   *

The supply-waggons of which Joanna had written had duly crossed into Alba, and their arrival raised the gratitude of some, and the ire of others, as anticipated. Donald MacNeill issued a very gracious public proclamation on the subject, which thanked King Henry (or,
as Donald MacNeill styled him, with more poetry than precision, Henry Tudor the Twelfth) for his generosity to a brother in arms, and confidently promised a like generosity should Britain ever find herself in similar difficulty. Sophie felt it had been very well done, and could not herself regard her father's bride-gift with anything but uncomplicated gladness; that there were men, women, and children in the hinterlands of Alba who should not starve before the end of the winter, or in the course of the next, seemed to her a benefit worth any amount of wounded pride.

She remained acutely aware, however, of the resentment which so many in Din Edin seemed to feel, and thus was not altogether surprised, though very much dismayed, when on a chill and fiercely bright afternoon late in February, her journey home from the University was interrupted by a river of people marching along the eastern edge of Ogilvy Square, up Stewart-street, and in the general direction of Castle Hill, chanting variations on the general theme of
Keep the Britons out!
She retreated into the dubious shelter of an oak-tree at the edge of the square—black and leafless, but for a sad brown curl here and there amongst its branches—and watched the marchers pass by.

They were a very mingled lot—every age from babes in arms to their grizzled great-grandparents, to all appearances; men and women; clerks and labourers and students—and in the midst of them, unmistakably, the grey-robed priests of the Cailleach.

Some of the marchers, inexplicably, carried tree-limbs over their shoulders as one might carry a pitchfork or a spade; a few bore lumpy bundles which looked distressingly likely to be filled with stones. Floating above the heads of the crowd—no, not floating, Sophie saw, but carried atop long poles like pikestaffs—were roughly human figures clad in a peculiar assortment of clothes. Peering up Stewart-street and down the edge of the square, Sophie counted four of them. A strangely attenuated figure, faceless and vaguely feminine in outline, attired entirely in what appeared to be ribbons and streamers: rowan-berry red, white and black and grey like winter-bare branches, dun and gold and the crimson of autumn dogwood. A barrel-chested man-thing—its torso was in fact, she saw as it drew
near her, an age-darkened barrel missing several staves—dressed in a kilted plaid whose pattern seemed to be woven mostly of greens and blues. A slighter figure dressed in breeches and coat, whose rough, faceless head was surmounted by a bright shock of straw—

Mother Goddess! It is meant for Roland.

And the last figure, also clad in coat and breeches, its head a mop of grey wool:
My father.

Where were all of these people going? Where—this was perhaps the better question—were the priests leading them, and for what purpose? And what, after more than a month's relative peace, had prompted what looked very like an escalation from peaceful manifestation to mob violence? There was anger simmering very close to the surface—there were men with weapons to hand, or at any rate objects which might be put to use as weapons.
Or as fuel for a fire?
Actual violence might or might not be intended; but in either event there seemed a very strong likelihood of the gathering's ending in grief.

The prudent, the sensible, the
obvious
course of action, then, was to await its passing and then, in the company of her father's guardsmen, to continue with all possible dispatch her interrupted journey to Quarry Close, where she should be safe.

Sophie swallowed, straightened away from her oak-tree, and, wrapping herself in her mother's magick, stepped out into the crowd.

*   *   *

The torrent flowed up Stewart-street, through Teviot Square, up Candle-makers' Row to the Grassmarket, where it surged and eddied around the priests in a manner that suggested they had reached their intended destination. Sophie hung back, wary, until the rising murmurs of the crowd and the efforts of those closest to her to peer over the heads of those ahead of them persuaded her that there must be something of significance afoot in that direction. She wove her way slowly towards the centre of the crowd, dodging elbows, and found herself at last almost within arm's reach of four grey-robed priests—and the effigy of her brother.

Close to, it was more crudely made even than it had appeared from a distance, but for the avoidance of doubt, it wore about its neck a placard on which had been painted—with more skill than was evident elsewhere in its construction—what were recognisably the golden lions of England and the dragon of Cymru. (Some part of Sophie's mind wondered dimly why those two symbols and not any of the rest, but they were certainly sufficient for identification.)

The branches and the makeshift sacks of stones—they were indeed stones, Sophie saw, as their bearers laid their bundles down and opened them, and some quite large enough to do significant damage, should anyone be so moved—had also migrated to the centre of the crowd. A sort of clearing had opened up, and the priests moved about it almost in the manner of players on a stage, directing the men who carried the four figures on their poles and the men, women, and children who bore branches and stones as they disposed themselves about the edges of the space.

One of the priests raised his arms, and a hush fell over the crowd.

Then another of them—a man of perhaps five-and-thirty, with a long plait of red-gold hair and a long beard a shade darker—stepped into the centre of the cleared space, then raised his head and began to speak.

Sophie's facility with Gaelic had grown by leaps and bounds over the course of her months in Din Edin, but she was by no means so easy or fluent as in her other languages, some of them familiar to her from childhood. Her own acquaintance, when not making use of her to practise their scholarly Latin, were accustomed to slow their speech very slightly, and acceded graciously to her requests for repetition or explanation—less frequent now than formerly; even the shopkeepers of the University district, resigned as they were to the perpetual presence of foreigners, made a habit of speaking slowly and clearly.

Of the rapid, dramatically inflected speech of the priest, therefore, she at first caught no more than one word in a dozen, and those not very enlightening:
Donald MacNeill, heiress, Sasunnach, betrayal,
enemy.
Nothing, in other words, which she had not heard stated or implied a dozen times before. Gradually, however, her ear grew more attuned, and she began to pick out whole phrases, and at last to understand at least the purport of everything she heard.

The more she understood, the colder seemed the raw February air, and the farther removed from the strangers pressed close about her.

At last the other priests appeared to have arranged everyone and everything to their satisfaction, and an anticipatory ripple ran through the onlookers as the four of them stood together in the centre of the cleared space, shoulder to shoulder, each facing one of the cardinal points. This must be some signal, though Sophie could not divine what its meaning might be.

The effigies, it transpired, were to be puppets of a sort; the priests were staging a play, in which the principals were the Kings of Britain and Alba, the hapless Sasunnach Prince, and the Cailleach herself, Queen of Winter. From this much reduced distance, Sophie could see that the figure representing this last had been carefully and lovingly made; its proportions were strange, its face almost featureless, but its head and limbs had been carved from some pale wood and sanded smooth, and its arms were jointed at shoulder and elbow, so that the two men whose charge it was (and for whom it was evidently not a new one, so smoothly did they work together) could produce graceful, almost natural movements. By contrast, the other three figures were rough, crude, hastily jury-rigged things, but their wielders made the best of their lot and contrived to endow them with some—entirely fabricated—personality.

The players did not speak; rather, their dumb-show illustrated the tale told by the four priests.

“In the Castle at Din Edin sits Donald MacNeill in the chieftain's seat of Alba. He seeks among his children and his sisters' children for an heir to his powers and his charge, and settles upon his daughter Lucia MacNeill. He seeks a husband for his daughter and heir, and passes over one chieftain's son after another . . .”

The plaid-wrapped figure of Donald MacNeill passed from man to man along the edge of the crowd.

“In a palace in London sits the Sasunnach King, and he casts his greedy eyes north and north to the fair hills of Alba. His father and grandfather tried and failed to march over our wall or to land their armies on our coasts, but he is a crafty King, and sees a means to succeed where his forebears failed—not with the arrows of Mars but with the arrows of Cupid will he conquer us.”

Sophie was so startled to hear the gods of Rome invoked—even so flippantly—by the priests of Alba's presiding goddess that she was a beat behind the rest of the crowd in grasping precisely what he had said.
Surely not,
she thought at once; and then, uneasily,
but . . .

“The Sasunnach King woos Donald MacNeill and his daughter with sweet words and promises, and he prays to his conqueror-gods, to his Ceres and his Robigus, to blight our crops and our beasts, to make his offers more difficult to refuse.
Now,
he thinks,
now Donald MacNeill will sell me his daughter and his kingdom in exchange for a few sacks of corn
.”

Sophie's feelings for her father were complicated and ambivalent, but this base accusation was so absurd that she could scarcely contain an indignant protest.
But is it? Has my father depths of cruelty, of subtlety, which I have not imagined?

“The gods of Rome are greedy for new conquests, and Alba has felt the sting of their lash ever since. The British King and his heir rejoice in Alba's suffering”—here the effigies of King Henry and Prince Roland did a crude, horrible sort of jig together, and Sophie gritted her teeth against a new access of indignation—“and Donald MacNeill wrings his hands and orders the storehouses opened, and like the men of Troy, welcomes in his enemy's self-serving gifts.”

Mutters of confusion amongst Sophie's immediate neighbours suggested that this barbed reference to
Danaos dona ferentes
had perhaps not found its intended target; but certainly the priests' attempt to portray Donald MacNeill as the hapless dupe of the scheming King Henry had done so. What might these people say, if Sophie should tell
them that—if Joanna spoke true, and in this matter, why should she not?—the impetus for Lucia MacNeill's marriage had come from her father and herself, and not from Henry of Britain at all? But surely they had heard Donald MacNeill say as much, just as she had, and his words had made no difference.