The Chessboard Queen (4 page)

Adon looked slightly embarrassed, a new sensation for him.

“No, Mistress, that is apparently not the way they do it. It seems that the child’s mother must provide the milk, or another woman who has recently given birth.”

“Are you sure? How will we ever manage that?”

“I am quite sure. I questioned several people on the matter. All of them were surprised that I did not know this and I could tell they guessed that I was not one of them, for they removed themselves quickly after we had spoken and some barred their doors against me.”

He waited a minute while she pondered his information.

“I had no further instructions, but I did not want to return without an answer. I hope I have done the correct thing.”

He glanced over his shoulder. From the anteroom behind him terrified screams could be heard, mixed with mewling whines. Adon nodded to two other men. They left and returned dragging a young woman, who continued her howling as she clutched a bundle tightly to her.

“What is this?” The Lady was annoyed. “I didn’t ask you to bring me another one.”

Adon tried to explain over the din. “We found her on the road. Her family has turned her out because of this.”

He pulled at the rags covering the bundle and a tiny hand appeared.

“She can feed Lancelot and her own, too, if she wishes. No one will miss her. Perhaps she can even show us how to keep him from soiling himself so much.”

The Lady considered this. The woman was dirty and ragged, but apparently healthy and strong. It was hard to tell through her terror if she had any intelligence, but there would be time to discover that. There seemed no other choice.

“Bring her to me!” The men pulled the woman forward. “Stop shrieking, girl! Listen to me. We have a baby here that needs tending. If you can keep him alive and care for him, we will feed you, clothe you, and let you keep that child of yours with you. If you won’t, then we will kill you. Which would you prefer?”

Someone brought Lancelot over to her. He was clearly older than her own child and curious about them both. He held out his arms to her and smiled. She stared at him with dull eyes. Then she reached out timidly and touched him.

“This is a human child?” she stammered, still stroking Lancelot’s arm.

“Yes, of course, or we would not need you.”

“I may keep my son, Torres?”

“If you must. As long as Lancelot does not suffer for it.”

The woman looked from her child to Lancelot and back. She had expected to die, anyway, when her father sent her from home. His anger had terrified her. How could she have known that he had been planning to marry her to a man with wealth enough to support them all? From somewhere, she smelled food.

She nodded to the Lady and took Lancelot with her free arm, balancing him on her hip.

“I will take him,” she announced. “I will care for him as I do my Torres. May I have something to eat now? I am very hungry.”

“So is he,” the Lady replied. “Feed him first and we will bring you food.”

The woman was too worn to argue. She sank to the floor, set Torres in the folds of her skirt, and pulled back the opening of her dress, oblivious to the group around her watching closely. Lancelot began at once to paw at her, arching his back and twisting his head to reach her breast. She adjusted him and he latched onto her, sucking noisily. The woman stroked his head.

“When did he last eat?” she demanded. She seemed to have accepted the situation and was asserting her authority as an expert among novices.

“I don’t know,” Nimuë answered. “A day ago, perhaps, except for the meat juice he sucked.”

“He is starving,” the woman stated with indignation. “I must have good food if he is to thrive. Where is your nursery?”

“Our what?”

“The place for the babies to sleep and play.”

Adon leaped to attention. “We have prepared a place. I will take you there at once.” He scooped up the other baby. “No, I will not hurt him. I am inhuman, but not insensitive. Follow me.”

As they left, the Lady turned to Nimuë. Her eyes were glowing with excitement. “What do you think, my dear, of this new game of ours?”

Nimuë laughed. “I think it should keep us amused for a long time.”

• • •

The raising of children was even more enthralling than the Lady had imagined. She was soon glad that they had allowed Meredydd to keep Torres with her. Playing and fighting together, the two boys were far more entertaining than one would have been. As they grew and began to walk and speak, it was clear that they had two very different personalities. Torres seemed to fit in naturally with the relaxed pattern of life beneath the water. Despite the fact that Meredydd became more and more gloomy and forbidding as the years passed, her son never worried. He laughed when he missed the mark with his arrows, cheered Lancelot from the ground when the stronger boy had bested him, and enlivened dinner with his attempts to balance full wine cups on his head or do handsprings over the tables.

Meredydd tried to teach him the hard facts of life, which were embodied in her own grim and rather garbled version of Christianity. Torres would sit listening patiently to her, smiling until he dozed off. He humored her, but paid no attention. Life was not dangerous and forbidding. Who had hurt him? He saw no disease or suffering. He had never felt either. His mother was very dear to him, but her ideas were sadly mistaken. Adon often thought that if Torres had not been brought to the Lady, he would have come to her himself.

But Lancelot! Adon sighed whenever he thought of him. He could not imagine the kind of man who could sire such a son. Lancelot had taken his first steps as he was to do everything—purposefully. He hadn’t wobbled a few feet and then fallen, but pulled himself up and trudged unwaveringly, his eyes glued to the toy he wanted lying on the other side of the room. There was a fierce intensity about him that would not allow for his own failure. Adon remembered the first riding lesson. Torres had laughed and slid on the broad back of his horse and soon demanded to be gotten down. Lancelot had gripped his horse tightly with his short legs, sat painfully erect, and refused to dismount until he had not walked but galloped across the field and back. He had been exhausted and sore for many days, but the next time they allowed him up he had done the same thing, and the next time and the next. Everyone admitted that Lancelot was the best horseman among them now. It would have taken a whirlwind to unseat him. But what was the need for that? When would he ever need to face a whirlwind? It was the same with everything he was taught: archery, swordsmanship, gymnastics, music. He had to know everything about the discipline and he applied himself single-mindedly until he mastered it perfectly. There was no living with him until he did.

And yet, if he gave himself so completely to learning, he also brought the same intensity to caring. Everyone he knew mattered to him. He listened to people and remembered what they cared for most. He worried about them. He inquired after their health, even though no one but he and Meredydd had ever been sick. And perhaps because it was clear to them all that his life would never be easy or perhaps because it was new to them to be loved, they all loved him, too. Emotions of any depth were foreign to them and they were almost ashamed of caring so; but, as he grew older, the decision of what to do with Lancelot was the main concern, not only of the Lady, but of all the inhabitants of the Lake.

Meredydd was concerned about him, too. She had failed in her duty to Torres, but in Lancelot she found a more apt pupil for her convictions. Meredydd was certain that life was simply a series of traps and pitfalls laid for unwary Man to fall into sin and torment. Most of these traps were sprung with no warning and could not be avoided. The only way to counter this was by continual atonement—not only for the wrong one had already done, but for the horrible sin one might commit tomorrow. Cruelty, selfishness, and avarice were not prevalent under the Lake and Meredydd made little of these. But hedonism, voluptuousness, sloth, and carnal behavior were, in her eyes, rampant among the Lake people. Meredydd had been made to suffer so for her one night of pleasure at the wrong time of the moon that she was convinced that sex must be the one unpardonable sin. She drummed this idea into Lancelot from childhood, encouraging him in his physical excesses so that his body would be too worn out to pay attention to the seductiveness of the wanton ladies of the court. She reminded him that it was she who had saved him with her milk when the Lady would have let him die. She continually reviled “those disgusting fiends” who had kidnapped her.

The taunts and slurs amused the people of the Lake. They found Meredydd rather pathetic. But Lancelot trusted her and became terribly bewildered. He could not believe that any of the people who raised him could be evil, but he would not doubt what Meredydd told him.

Gradually Lancelot began to work out his own version of what he had been taught. He knew for certain that the Lady, Adon, Nimuë, Torres, Meredydd—everyone he loved—were good. They could not be otherwise simply because he loved them so. If the Lady and her people sinned, it was only through ignorance. But they seemed so happy in their innocence that he could not bear to destroy it. Yet he could not let them drift to the torments of hell. Meredydd had been vague about the nature of punishments meted out to sinners, but she knew the story of the Crucifixion and was dimly aware that Christ had died to atone for someone’s sins, although they did not seem to be hers. Her doctrine was that of personal culpability with no chance of intercession.

Lancelot could not believe that.

“I love them,” he reasoned, “and I wish to bear their punishment for them. Why should I not be permitted to give myself for them?”

Lancelot resolved to make atonement in the only ways he knew. He went without eating, slept on the floor, beat himself with sticks, all in secret. The Lady could not understand why he was becoming so weak and pale until one day she was awakened by muffled screams of anguish coming from behind the stables.

Everyone else slept, but the Lady roused Adon to come with her. She rushed in near panic to the source of the noise.

She did not know until that moment how much she adored him. He was crouched in the corner of a stall, trying, with a rock in one hand, to drive a nail into his other palm. He had pushed it nearly through and was conscious only through force of will. For the first time in memory, she completely lost control.

“Lancelot!” she screamed. “Oh, my precious, my dearest, why? How can you do this?”

She wept as she gathered him in her arms, trying to pull the nail out and force him to give up the tightly clenched rock. As blood poured from the wound, she laid her hand over his and called on powers which she rarely dared to touch to stop the flow and numb the pain. Lancelot was hysterical, partly from agony and partly from fear that he would be stopped before he had managed to accomplish his mission.

“Adon! Stop her! Please, my Lady! Let me go! You must let me! I must! I can’t let anything happen to you! No, don’t! You don’t understand!”

“Lancelot, my darling child! Of course I don’t understand. How could you do this to yourself? Don’t you see how it hurts and frightens us? You must promise never to try anything like this again.” The Lady’s voice was still shaking and there were tears on her cheeks.

“Please, Lancelot.” Adon’s voice was also unsteady. “You are mistaken. Nothing will happen to us. Nothing ever has. What did you think you were saving us from?”

Lancelot stared at his palm. The wound was still open, but the blood had stopped flowing. The driving agony was gone, replaced by a dull ache. He searched the face of the Lady. There was no comprehension in it, only concern. He wondered if they would laugh at him. Probably. How could they know that they were on the edge of the abyss and that only he was working to pull them back? He shook his head.

“I can’t explain it, Lady. I’m sorry.”

“Then we must insist that you never try to harm yourself again, not in any way.” Adon’s voice was firm.

Lancelot was defeated. “I promise, but I wish. . . . All right, I promise.”

Adon carried him to his room and gave him a sleeping draught. Then he returned to the Lady.

“Do you think he is safe?” she asked.

“Have you ever known him to break his word?”

“No, but I am afraid for him. What do you think he was attempting?”

“I am not sure, but I can guess that somehow Meredydd is at the core of it. We should question her tomorrow. I will watch by Lancelot’s bed tonight.”

“You said he was in no danger,” the Lady said in alarm.

“He isn’t. But somehow I feel the need to watch. Good night, my Lady.”

Lancelot made no more attempts to damage himself, but that incident made it clear to everyone that their toy was turning into something that they did not comprehend and could not control. Some weeks later Adon and the Lady were still trying to decide what to do with him.

“We can’t let him out into the world,” Adon fretted. “How would he react to the misery of lives out there?”

“I don’t know.” The Lady paced up and down in her private room. The softness of the furnishings and the gentle waver of candlelight on diamonds did not help to ease her nervousness.

“There is nothing we can do to prevent his going out there. There are rules in these matters. Before he can choose, he must know what the choices are. But how can we teach him about humans? We hardly understand them, ourselves. If we had, we might have realized what Meredydd was doing to him. Oh, how I wish we had killed her the day those boys were weaned!”

Adon sighed and stretched out on the bed. “Well, we didn’t. Our ignorance kept us from wanting to take all the responsibility for their welfare. If we cannot make him wise, at least we can be sure he is strong. He must be able to fight his own battles out there. He is sure to find them. It won’t be hard to train him. He can already beat any man here in fair competition. For the rest . . . he will have to discover that himself.”

“But we can’t just take him to the shore of the Lake and abandon him!” Her pacing was becoming staccato. “We must find a place to send him, or someone to care for him.”