Robin McKinley (25 page)

“Very well,” she said to the bees. When she put her hand on that saddlebag, they all flew away.

She filled her flask with the indolent water and added more honey than usual, from that particular pot, then tasted the result, which was also not something she usually did. And she felt a vast uplift of her sagging mood, as if her spirit had grown wings and soared into the sky. She didn’t use that honey again to counter sleepy water, but she used it on herself when the road ahead seemed unbearably long, and she dropped it on the ponies’ meagre nightly handfuls of corn.

She never remembered falling asleep. But on several of those occasions when she came back to herself standing up, she found a bee clinging to her mouth, pushing a tiny ball of pollen between her lips. It had a pleasant nutty flavour. My bees not only make combless honey and honeyless comb, she thought bemusedly, they also store pollen as squirrels store acorns.

After the first time this happened, she stopped trying to send her bees home, not that there was any way—as she had often told people who weren’t beekeepers—that you could ever tell bees to do anything. But if bees were behaving in so un-bee-like a manner as to follow a human being anywhere at all, perhaps they would listen to that human being telling them to go home. They didn’t. So in the evening, when she’d pulled the ponies’ tack off, and rubbed them down, and ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html given them their corn, she also opened a jar of honey and set it out for the bees, carefully wrapping it up again as soon as there were no bees left on it. She wondered if any of the woodland and meadow creatures who would be happy to eat honey any time they could, would follow the strange trail of sweet drips and drizzles she was leaving and investigate one of their campsites; but none ever did. But then they never stayed more than a few short hours anywhere either, and rarely even that long.

Occasionally their way took them along the margin of a field with cattle or sheep pastured in it.

But farmhouses and barns were rarely built near the edge of a demesne, and with the harvest in, most beasts were brought as near home as possible to make winter feeding easier. Once they passed a field of heifers who had to gallop over and investigate; and Ironfoot, who didn’t mind bees, was inclined to prance. The bees themselves tactfully disappeared and reappeared when the heifers had been left behind. Once they crossed a turnip field where sheep had just been loosed, and the sharp smell of freshly bitten turnips was a shock of reminder of why she was there and what she was doing: that the demesne could go on being a place where sheep and turnips grew and thrived.

She only saw other human beings twice. Once as she emerged from a wood she saw a woman, head bent, shawl wrapped closely round her, hurrying along a path on the far side of a leaf-fallen hedgerow parallel to the way Mirasol was going; she did not look up. And once, as Mirasol skirted along a freshly cut field, she saw the late stookers lifting and tossing their sheaves. They did see her, and paused. She raised a hand to them, and all their hands went up immediately in response. One of them shouted something. It sounded likeGood luck, Lady.

During any night hours that she was sitting on a pony or by a campfire, the bees settled round her shoulders like a cape. If she was moving around too briskly, they would collect in little dark furry puddles on the heap of baggage. The ponies did not seem to heed the bees at all, or to have taken any time to adjust to their small companions’ company; often she found a few bees buried in the ponies’ warm manes in the mornings.

They were lucky with the moon; and they remained lucky with the weather. They were lucky too with the earthlines themselves, which often enough seemed to be expecting her, waiting for her—almost as if someone had been there before her and whispered to them,Your Chalice is coming. Be ready. By the third day she had realised that she would not have got round the entire demesne in time if the earthlines had been less unusually alert, unusually close to where human awareness can reach them, if she had had to spend more time calling them, asking them to listen to her. It was as if a ploughman found his horses already in harness, and all he had to do was lead them out and back them into their places.Thank you, she whispered; but she would have thanked the earthlines anyway. She was also thanking…she didn’t know. But twice, when complex bindings had slid together like a belt buckling, and she had lit a little fire after, the fire had sprung to life almost before the flint touched the tinder. The first time she had been lighting a fire to eat hot food in celebration of the unexpectedly powerful and straightforward binding; the second time it was to see if the fire would leap into existence in the same eager way. It did.

If…

ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html It was unusual for a Master to be able to speak to the earthlines all over his demesne from his House, but it was not unknown; and she thought she would have sensed his presence if he were walking the earthlines with her in the mundane world. Was it he? Was it his interference that was making her impossible task a thread more possible? Did that mean—she thought with a frantic little rush of hope—that he would fight on the day of thefaenorn ? The hope drained away from her just as quickly. It would not matter if he did; he was still weak and clumsy—weaker and clumsier than the worthless Horuld.

She did not know how much the earthlines understood of human affairs; perhaps they were responding to the demesne’s need for unity in the face of an outblood Master for their own sake.

They had known something was wrong the day thefaenorn had been declared. Whatever the cause of their ready cooperation she was grateful.

But on the morning of the day before thefaenorn she had to take up the ponies’ girths a second hole.

“It is almost over,” she whispered to them. “Tomorrow you will be back in your own stalls, with as much hay as you can eat, and this journey will soon become only a harsh dream, and you will think to yourselves, Neither the Grand Seneschal nor our master of the stables would have sent us to be used so; it was only a dream.” Let it only be a dream to them, she thought, and to all the ponies and sheep and heifers of the demesne. Let there still be a demesne, another sennight hence.

She had left the pavilion hill till last. It had meant a long awkward curve back on their own trail when, near the end of their journey, they were already very weary; but she had no idea how to address the hill, and merely by making it last there would be a strength to any binding she might be able to create. It was past midnight of the day of thefaenorn when they arrived; from the pavilion they would have to go straight on to the House with only what rest the ponies had had while she tried to reach the earthlines of the old hill. She untacked the ponies and hobbled them while she thought about what she was going to do.

She had used candles sparingly, at the twenty-four points of the Circle, the Ladywell, and the First Tree. She put out all the candles she had left around the outside of the pavilion, setting them on the ruined walls so she would be able to see them from the inside. She had one fresh candle, and stood holding it, unlit, the winter wind hissing through her hair. As the wind moved through the dry leaves on the full-grown trees at the edge of what had been the parkland around the pavilion, it seemed to be muttering words she could not understand.

The earthlines here were confused and unhappy. She knew where they had to run because of where they came and left this place, and where the pavilion had been built, before it had been turned to bad purpose; but she could not see or hear them clearly. It was a little like listening to fretful voices in another room with the door closed. She could hear the distress and discomfort, but she did not know who spoke nor what they were saying. She knew it was part of her responsibility as Chalice to bring the pavilion hill back into alignment with the rest of the ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html demesne, to smooth and quiet the earthlines—as you might untangle the fringe on a tapestry or soothe an agitated dog. But she knew that as yet neither her strength nor her experience was equal to the task—like a blind person untangling the fringe, or a stranger soothing the dog. But wouldn’t the blind person have sensitive fingers for the knots, and mightn’t the stranger make friends with the dog?

But if this place were a tapestry, it would be a tapestry to hang in the front hall of the king, where, legend had it, the ceiling was five stories high and the floor a hectare; if it were a dog, it was the Dog that guarded the entrance to the caves of the gods of the earthlines, where no mortal went. This hill had been a danger to the wholeness of the demesne since the death of the old Master. But the Chalice whose task it was to right and purify it needed to be able to call on her Master and the rest of the Circle for help. Mirasol feared her Master was no more up to the challenge than she was, and most of the rest of the Circle she did not trust; and there was always so much other work to do. And so the pavilion had been allowed to smoulder on, like a cave fire that might find a dangerous new portal to the surface at any time, and rage out over the land….

And now, if thefaenorn went as everyone believed it was going to…. She had to keep shutting off thoughts about her own future to concentrate her sore and weary skill on the future of her demesne.

Hesitatingly she went and stood where she had lain and slept the night the Master had found and saved her. If there were anywhere in this haunted spot that she might be able to make her presence—and therefore her message—felt, then this was probably it; despite that she had failed in her aim, on that previous visit. If she was very lucky, the Master’s own power had been felt here too, and the earthlines might respond to that memory, if she was able to reach it, to touch it…. If she was able to name him as different from his brother, who as Master had done so much hurt to this place. Different, and yet Master. Master, human and no priest of Fire.

Or if he had been here before her, as she suspected he had been elsewhere. But she knew almost at once that the earthlines here had spoken to no one recently. If he had tried here, he too had failed.

She left her candle where she had been standing while she lit all the rest. She had never felt so feeble and ineffectual as she mixed a driblet of every kind of honey she had brought with the last of her Ladywell water and went round the base of the hill, scattering the drops with her fingers, murmuring,Be thou one and one-hearted. She climbed the hill and scattered the last of her sweet water around the ruined walls. The flicker of her candle flames seemed to fall on her like drops of honey.

Last she knelt and lit her one remaining fresh candle, and put herself into the mind frame where she became a part of the earthline system herself. After the last six days this was much easier than it had ever been, while at the same time she was bruised and chafed and aching with the effort of repetition, as bruised and chafed and aching as her legs and back were from too many hours in a saddle. As a bloodright bearer she had always been able to listen to the earthlines, but when she had become Chalice she had had to invent her entrance among them, where they might listen to her, because there had been no one to teach her how. And she suspected she hadn’t done it very well. The soreness was probably the result of her awkwardness; shouldn’t the Chalice find ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html the earthlines as familiar as the shape of her own hands on a goblet, the contact as sleek as flowing water? She was still much more familiar with the shape of a honeycomb, of knowing worker brood from queen cells, of recognising when the drones’ idle flying on a warm summer day suddenly takes on purpose because they have sensed a young queen on her maiden flight.

She was trying to hold that sense of peace and comfort and the hopeful future of a vigorous young bee queen on a warm summer day, trying to take it with her, into the troubled murk of the earthlines beneath the old knoll. She was gripping warmth of summer and daylight so hard that she lost her sense of cold and winter and darkness. She didn’t feel the snow starting again, drifting down against her face. The soft touch of the flakes felt a little like bees’ feet. And she was so tired….

Sitting up, she fell asleep.

And dreamed.

She dreamed she was walking down a long dark corridor with many branching passages, and the sound of mournful voices all around her, so she could not tell from which direction they came.

She seemed to walk in the dark for a very long time; the sense of a circulation of air told her which way to walk, and kept her from bumping into the walls. She was glad not to turn down any of the other ways, both for the eerie sound of the sad voices, and because the darkness in all but the corridor she followed seemed absolute. The corridor began to climb, and the darkness lessened till it was no more than twilight, and at last a bright spot slowly cohered out of the twilight, and became the end of a tunnel.

When she emerged, blinking, into the daylight, there were many people around her, and a gallery or summer-house made of tall poles with flowers woven into ropes hung between them.

A wedding party. She didn’t want to know who was getting married. She turned around, but the tunnel had disappeared; there was only grass and sunlight, and poles and flowers and people. She saw the little group of priests, waiting to perform the various rites necessary for a grand wedding: by the number of poles and flowers as well as the number of priests, this had to be a very grand wedding. The priests were too far away for her to see any of their faces clearly. She also saw the back of the man waiting for his bride. She recognised him as the bridegroom, as she recognised the priests, by the clothes he was wearing. She saw several members of a Circle; these too she recognised only by the badges they wore.