Plenilune (45 page)

“Sooth, and I am English.”

He did not look as though he understood her, but neither did he appear inclined to argue. He moved toward the kitchen hallway and she, waiting until the door swung shut behind him, forced herself to run upstairs in a sudden flurry of panic with the full weight of what she was about to do racing to overtake her. She locked her door behind her as if to lock the terror out. In haste she dressed, hauling on the heavy riding gown and dressing her hair and shoulders in a tartan against the wet. The tartan was curiously real among all the heavy things she pulled on: its stripes of red sang out against the grey morning and seemed to her like slender threads of hope or sanity.

What gave the morning a dimension of pain, which the heavy fog had managed to block out until now, was the moment when Margaret, swathed against the cold, pulled the little atlas out from amongst her private things and turned it open. There again, leaping up in coffee-colour and atrament, were Marenové and the Marius Hills—and Lookinglass a kind of embattled star to the east on the edge of a long dragon-back of hills. She saw Darkling and Orzelon-gang, the steppes, the narrow, misshapen Honour of Thrasymene; but all this passed by her in a kind of fitful blur, like a fly that is angrily swatted away. What she did see was the small, intricate, almost life-like figure of a dragon hard by the east side of the Marius Hills, pointing west into the lift of the fells as if to mark a path. With her heart uncomfortably where her throat should be, she lifted the corner of the page and slid her hand underneath it.

“God forgive me,” she murmured, and tore the page from the book.

The agony of terror settled in the pit of her stomach, singing a warning tune that threatened to heave back up the light breakfast she fought to swallow. The feeling did not begin to ebb until she was well out of the home meads and jigging up the sodden north road, Marenové House lost in the mist at her back. Then she was alone with the cold and the long road before her, and it was easier not to think about what she was doing. She did not feel much madness; she felt the constant but diminished flutter of fear at being met—a lady alone upon the road—and felt keenly the stinging wet knife of the wind, but over that there grew another feeling, a feeling akin to the marshlight country around her and the shepherd’s panpipe on the fells, something altogether of Plenilune, which sang out of her heart like the hawk let loose on the wing. It was speckled gold like a grouse’s wing and dipped itself in the blood that was still coming out of her soul. It was an awful, beautiful feeling.

She met no one on the road. Once she heard the lumber of a cart to one side, muffled as though by a bank or a thick hedge, and once she heard voices and the complaint of a cow, but otherwise she was alone, moving at alternate speeds up the damp stone causeway, moving through the roiling mists and sudden flurries of snow, the pound of her heart and the sweet ring of shod hooves the only sounds in her world. They only silenced once when she squeezed under the low-hanging branches of a cedar, plunged into a sudden eclipse of darkness, and fumbled with ice-numb hands at the crumpled paper of her map. In the gloom she studied it, struck by the sudden rational fear that she might miss the turn in the thick winter weather.

There is no room for mistakes. I will not miss the turn.

She brushed aside the cedar, flinging rain-droplets everywhere, and kicked Hanging Tree back onto the road.

For hours she moved at the palfrey’s swinging lope, too numb with cold and full of determination to feel the creeping ache of being in the saddle. The sun was obscured behind an oppressive sky: she had no notion what the hour was. She felt no sense of hunger or saw any change in the light to assure her she had not passed into the lowlands of hell where time, like a cruel mockery of eternity, drew out in interminable moments of monotony. Weariness, mistaken for the fog until she found herself jerking upright again, swept over her from time to time; in time it became so severe that she reached desperately for a means of keeping her mind sharp against the elements. In low tones, pitched to the ring of iron on stone, she sang the few bars she knew of Kinloss’ lullaby. It seemed oddly fitting, considering what she went to do and on what darcy-coloured mount she went to do it.

It seemed very fitting.

In time the Marius Hills loomed beside her, closer and closer, an unbroken darkness against the seething grey. It had been snowing for the past hour in idle flakes that seemed to hang upon the air and never settle; her horse, flecked in black and white, seemed a creature born of the shifting winter weather. Her weariness expected it to melt away beneath her. But it kept going, wearier than she, huffing, shoes scuffing on the causeway and dirt track onto which she led it; its pace had noticeably slackened.

“Not long now,” Margaret urged it, giving it a pat on the neck. Out of the mist before her its ears swivelled back at the sound of her voice. “Not long now, girl. Step up. Step up…”

It was another thirty minutes and, by the sudden plunge of the light, well into the evening by the time the palfrey was tripping up a broken, disused road, wading through dead weeds and fallen branches, the stark rise of the hillside hanging almost over their heads. Margaret felt a new apprehension: not of being followed, but of being met.

For some time Hanging Tree fought the path, stumbling often, once nearly throwing Margaret. Her cry of surprise rang out over a seemingly empty land, bounding off rocks, startling a crow out of its barren tree. She recovered, breathless, and watched the dark bird disappear among the thickening clouds. A chill crawled over her flesh. She forced herself to go on, climbing down from her mare and tying it to a pine where it might have some shelter. Having only her skirts and the map to fight with, she struck out up the steep path, wholly alone now, with the feeling of having left the world of the living behind.

She nearly missed the opening in the dark. There was no denying the early winter night had come. Working with a sodden skirt in one hand and her other hand against the rock face of the hill, she slipped on the opening and stumbled, but picked herself back up and meant to go on when, checking, she turned into the deeper darkness. Every primal sense of the evil of the dark welled up in her throat, straining at a whimper. The force of terror was physical: she felt herself moving her feet slowly against it as one struggles to move in a dream. Her only clear thought was that she had to go on. The only feeling she felt was the almost overpowering instinct to turn and run.

Time went on and the dark became thin, less tangible with atmosphere, and warmer. She had only just really grown used to it, and even come to suppress her fear of it, when the unutterable black was broken by three faint spars of white-fire colour, fanning like a swan’s wing. Round the bend and downward she saw a precise end to the dark tunnel and an opening into the light.

This time she did not stop, as she had stopped when she had held the books in her hands for the first time, though she felt even more keenly the sense of going forward and never being able to go back. But she had reckoned of that hours before. What was there for her to go back to? She forced herself to go onward into the underground unknown. She did not feel courageous, of that she was clearly, bluntly aware: she felt only a sense of desperation, a reckless desperation, which kept her not only from turning back but from halting in paralyzing fear. It was not hard to loathe herself for the thought of turning back: it took the sheer sickening taste of desperation in her mouth to put one foot in front of the other.

She stopped in the archway only because she knew she must.

There was an enormous chamber beyond, faced in black marble and supported by black marble columns, and it was lit—she did not see how—by an eerie pale blue light that seemed naggingly familiar. She could not recall where she had seen a light like that before. But her eye was drawn almost instantly to the figure in the middle ground. It was alarmingly close and huge, perfectly still, a long, thick serpentine body coiled round and round and over itself suspended by seemingly nothing in the centre of the room. It had no wings. She could not see any legs. It seemed to lie by its own necromancy on the air. It was beautiful, startlingly beautiful, but the impossibility and hugeness of it made it hideous to Margaret in that first horrible moment.

The head was facing the archway. It was resting on the topmost coil of its body, as if it had been sleeping, but it was wide awake and watchful, and it had seen her the moment she had stepped into sight. It looked at her out of a great half-moon hazel eye long and scrutinously; she could see her reflection in the precious green-gold mirror: she stared back with a combined horror and awe. Its eye was deep and quick and cunning, and it looked at her as if she had just done—and was still doing—something wretchedly wicked.

With a supreme effort Margaret detached herself from that basilisk stare and bent her knees, trembling but determined, shutting her own eyes just long enough to conjure afresh in her memory the image of the fox lying battered in her arms, his breath coming in painful, shuddering gasps—

That was what was wrong. With a body that enormous the dragon’s breathing ought to be audible. The room was completely silent.

Why dost thou bow to me
, asked the dragon,
when thou art a Lady among men and tread the worlds under thy feet?

Its mouth never moved. It watched her with its unblinking eye while a wind which she could not feel gently stirred its long roan-blue mane and made its blurred, coiled reflection in the dark marble shift like moonlight on water.

That was what it was. The pale light was moonlight. But it had been so long since Margaret had seen the moon hanging in the sky that she had forgotten, and she felt, when she realized it, that she was remembering an old folktale that had long ago been proven wrong and was nothing more than a story for children.

“Forgive m-my intrusion.” Her voiced sounded small in her own ears and full of the blood of her own veins and the air of her own lungs. “I am come for help.”

Why?

She looked into its inhuman eye and wondered if it could understand. She was not sure if
she
wholly understood. She tightened her fists and swallowed back the sudden taste of angry, helpless tears. “I am come for help because there is no one else to whom we can turn. No one will dare stand up to Rupert de la Mare and if I do not find help he will kill my only friend and—” But what did she matter? It was of no importance now that she would have to marry Rupert. The fox was all that mattered. “He will kill my friend,” she finished in a hard voice. “He will kill my friend.”

The eye flickered over her for a long, silent moment, then the dragon lifted its head off its pillowing body and turned it round so that she could see up its muzzle to the poll between its fine thin horns and forelock—and she saw, too, that its left eye, which had been turned away from her, was clouded silver and the brow was cloven and scarred.

It is of great import to thee that, though the world groans under oppression and fears de la Mare’s future rule, thy single friend should lose his life?

It did not sound condemning: it sounded oddly curious. Margaret suddenly felt that
she
was the strange one, and that the dragon was peering at her with the great, reserved, intense curiosity of the long-lived and mighty.

“It is,” she admitted. “It is of the utmost import to me. Is there, then, something you can do?”

It was silent for a moment. The intangible wind continued to stir its mane. Its neck, reared back, its head, flame-shaped and perfect save for the one deformed eye, was a gorgeous mixture of calm and quizzicality. The fear ran away between Margaret’s fingers. She wanted to touch it, as she had wanted to touch the fox, to feel the living warmth of it beneath her palm, to feel all that power under her hand. An electric prickle of excitement ran along the backs of her arms.

Dost know, Lady, how I came by this blindness?

Politely, she shook her head.

It rolled its head to the left; its good eye grew distant, introspective.
There are things and there are things which we hold dear in our beings. They come into the soul of thee and become thy life-thing—without which thou couldst not live. Even so for me, once—as it is for thee each day of thy life—my life-thing was in jeopardy, the glory of my being and the apple of mine eye at risk of damage. And so I fought for it. Is life not cheap when all life-things are taken away? I fought for it, and flung out from amidst me a lord who could, like unto thyself, pass in the guise of manlike beauty. I flung him out for anger, but at a price: the price of my own eye.

“But you did not mind, I think,” Margaret said quietly, “having to give it up.”

The dragon smiled.
Well I would have given up the other with it, if that was what was needful.

She wondered then if she would ever see Aylesward again, the long drive up to the door and the high front passage swimming with grey rainy light; she wondered if she would ever see the cellar of Marenové House and the warm gold lamplight on the fox’s wall eyes. But even as she wondered it, she knew it did not matter. With a little gesture, almost of offering sacrifice, she raised both hands, palms upward, and dropped them again. “Was it Plenilune for which you gave up your eye?” she asked.

Nay. ’Twas Heaven.

Thou wouldst, then, outdeuce the devil.

Her knees had foresworn her and she had buckled to the ground. With one hand on the black marble, splayed, ready by extreme will to push herself back up, Margaret met the terrible eye. “Will you help us? There is no one else to help us and we are all wandering in God’s silence.”

With a breathless rustle the dragon lifted its head and shook it from side to side, pensively.
I can do the thing that is in thy mind to do. What must be done, though thou dost not know it—that power lies elsewhere, O Lady. Now, I will give to thee a spell-breaking spell—for the stricture to all spells is that they can be broken—and send thee back quicker than thou camest. Hast lost, I feel, some handle on thy timely element!