The Widow and the King (20 page)

So he knew exactly who she was. Of course he did. And she saw from his look that he also knew she would get into trouble for being out on her own when such a troop passed by.

She looked at him mulishly, and he smiled.

She hadn't thought his face was handsome. She did not like beards (even beards that were little more than pale stubble about the face and chin). His eyes were grey and slightly sunk, and for a moment they were still wide with the danger that had just passed them. But they relaxed as he looked down at her, and a light came into them with his smile.

Something about the way he smiled stirred an old, friendly memory of her father before he had gone away.

‘There's the postern door in the river-tower …’ he said.

The postern led straight into the cellar corridor under the living quarters. Once it would have been guarded and used daily for unloading stores from barges that docked below the walls. But there was very little river-traffic now, and with this new uprising there might soon be none.

‘It will be bolted.’

‘I was saying, I could go in by the gate and unbolt it from the inside. If you waited a little, it would be open when you tried it. There's an old boat-shelter on the riverbank, which I use now and again. You could reach it and not be seen, perhaps?’

It would be difficult. No, it would impossible, with the garrison alert and alarmed as it would be. And the moment
anyone saw her they would tell the Widow, for the credit of it.

She saw him understand that, too.

‘I've a cloak and hood on the bank you can wear,’ he said. ‘Nice and long and ragged. You'll look like a true fishwife. It's the best we can do.’ He turned to go.

‘Your pardon, sir …’

He looked back.

What was she thinking of ? She didn't call scholars
sir
. She was talking to him as if he were a priest – or a knight. Perhaps that was because he carried himself like one.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Chawlin.’ He leaped the ditch without waiting, and disappeared into the bushes.

She followed him far enough to be concealed from the road, and waited.

She was scared, but unrepentant. Yes, she had nearly been caught, and caught by people far worse than her mother's cronies. It had been the worst possible chance that those horsemen had been on the road just then. But she had got away with it. And with a little good luck now, and the help of this scholar, she was going to get back inside the walls without anyone knowing she had been away.

The scholar had not asked what she had been doing by the bank. If he guessed, he did not seem to mind. And if he was doing so much to help her he might not even tell the others. He was taking a risk for her, indeed. If they were discovered he might well be punished. She wondered if he hated the Widow, and was doing this to spite her. But it did not sound like that. It was more as if he just knew
what it must be to live as the Widow's daughter. She thought again of her father, chuckling among the Angels.

And he spoke well, she thought. His voice was soft and slow, and it was laced with words like
perhaps
, as if the thing he was most sure of was that nothing could be sure. To anyone who endured the implacable certainties of the Widow, that was refreshing.

She stood among the bushes, waiting for him to return.

Only a few minutes ago she had been creeping past this spot on the way to the bank, eager to spy on a row of half-naked boys. She had not seen the horsemen. She had not seen the scholar smile. It seemed to her that so much had happened in a short space of time. She wanted to think about it. And her reasons for coming here seemed rather childish now.

Perhaps she had not been fair about the scholars. They were not all louts and props to her mother's vanity. She felt now that she wouldn't mind the company of some of the older ones – the ones who were really men, like this man Chawlin, and not just boys grown big. Maybe they all talked together about what they had heard in the classes – and laughed gently at the foolishness of the masters. She was sorry that she hadn't had the chance to find out.

That was the Widow's fault, she thought. Everything became a weapon or a battleground around
her
. She spoiled a lot of things, when you looked at it.

Sophia looked up as the man came pushing back through a screen of bushes.

‘What did you mean about when you met my mother?’ she asked.

He hesitated. ‘That's a long story, and there's no time
for it now. Another day would be better.’ He held out a torn, brown cloak. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘When you reach the shelter, wait a quarter hour and then come up to the castle wall. Bring my rod with you. Make sure you are well in under the wall, out of sight of the keep-watch, before you approach the door. Once you are through the door, bolt it again and leave the rod and cloak in the old storeroom that's first down the passage. I'll come back for them later. You understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good luck, then.’

Her success was her downfall. In her elation at passing the door unseen, she thought she could escape punishment altogether. So when she was called to account for her disappearance and missed lessons, she claimed that she had been in the library, and had lost track of time there. But this story collapsed under the evidence of the rents in her dress (which, as Hestie, her governess, reminded her all red-faced, would now have to be mended, and who was to do
that
, pray the Angels?). So she confessed instead to an adventure in the castle attics. And for that she was beaten anyway, with extra for the first lie and several strokes over because the Widow, who had heard more than one story from the gate-guard, did not really believe her even then.

It was Hestie who gave her the beating, with her thin little cane of thornwood. Sophia could have forgiven her for that, because it was the Widow who had made her do it. But then Hestie saw fit to say that if Sophia could not
learn her duty she would be no better than the Whore of Tarceny, who had fled a royal betrothal for lust, and caused all that war and misery and suffering and the death of Sophia's father to boot. And that was
not
fair, because she would never do anything like the Whore of Tarceny, and Hestie was as good as saying that she would murder her own father or at least did not care about his memory, and she
did
, more than any of them.

Next morning (still sore) she found that her private lessons had been taken away. Her mother had sent one of the masters on an embassy, she was told, and the rest were now unable to indulge her. Worse, Hestie was again saying that she must be escorted whenever she moved outside the living quarters, let alone the castle.

And
when she came to take her place at the scholars' benches (arriving late, because neither Hestie nor she knew how the lectures were organized), she saw that she had been put with a group of younger students. She felt that she wouldn't have minded so much if it had been with people like the man Chawlin and his peers. But these boys were at the very beginning of the middle studies that her tutors always thought she neglected. Feeling that she was still being punished, she slid into the last place in the back row and sat beside a long, dark-haired boy who could be no more than twelve or thirteen. There she started to sulk.

The master was Padry, who until yesterday had attended her twice a week to tutor her in Astrology and Mathematics. He gave her no sign of recognition. Either he hadn't noticed her when she came in, or he was pointedly treating her like any other of the rabble of scholars in the class. He stumped around the room in his heavy
green robe, expounding the System of Croscan in almost exactly the same words that he had used in her private lesson last month.

‘Everything that is, springs from one source, which is the Godhead. It scatters into the world like shards of light broken by a glass.

‘And like light, it reflects back to our eye that sense of the Godhead in what it has become – if we have the wit to see it.

‘Therefore everything that is, has meaning.

‘We are surrounded by meanings. Many things – perhaps most – may have more than one meaning, depending upon the time and situation in which we behold them. Thus it may be true that the flight of a swan may foretell the fate of a man. But which swan? Which man? And at what hour has the swan this meaning, and not another?

‘So that we may find order, and a true path for our understanding, Croscan proposes a system of twenty-one signs. Taken together these signs describe our descent from Heaven and our return to it. Taken singly, each may be a gate to the myriad of Heaven-sent meanings that surround us. By Midwinter you will know all twenty-one signs and their meanings. After that we will begin to explore outwards from each sign into the world of signs that surrounds it.’

The first sign is Fire, thought Sophia. Already blood was beginning to bang around inside her skull.

‘The first sign is Fire,’ said Padry. He raised one arm ponderously, revealing the gaudy red and gold flamepattern that curled up the inside of his gown. (Sophia,
who had seen him do this before, was unimpressed.)

‘Fire is bright; and yet it is formless, ever-changing. It gives light, and light is truth. Therefore fire is a sign to us of Heaven, of the unknowable Godhead that lies beyond the world, and beyond the Angels that were sent into the world for our sake. For this reason a flame burns endlessly on every altar in the land.’

Oh, get on with it, thought Sophia. The second sign …

There was a soft clicking sound from the boy on her left.

‘The second sign is the Sun. On the first arc of Croscan's path, the arc of Descent, the Sun stands for Kingship. Why? It is magnificent. It rules the day. But more than this, it is
of fire
, the heavenly sign. And just so is Kingship touched by Heaven, for it is the duty of a king to bring the truth of Heaven to his people, above all in the form of justice.

‘Now consider the purpose of a sign. In these days the faithless cry that the Kingdom is fallen to a wretched state. The Learning Houses are wasted, and Kingship itself is threatened. All true. But look to the sun! What does the sun tell us? It shines still, above all the misery of the world. Heaven has not ordained that it should leave us. Why then should Kingship leave us? Let the sun be a sign to us that right Kingship is still possible, and may still bring the land justice, and with justice the peace that flows from it.’

Sophia gritted her teeth and set herself to suffer. The ill-smelling scholars on the bench in front of her were starting to shift and fidget. The morning stretched ahead of her like a corridor with no end.

Something clicked from the boy on her left again.

‘Stop it,’ she muttered. ‘I'm starting a headache.’

‘Sorry,’ said the boy, as if he had barely heard.

She looked at him. This was someone she had not seen before.

He had a fine, pale face under the black curls of his hair. Yes, about twelve or thirteen, she thought. Many scholars his age would still be learning and re-learning their Grammar with Father Grismonde, but they must have thought that this one had come far enough to join the middle class. He was alert; yet he kept glancing around the room, frowning into corners as if he thought they should not be empty. The clicking came from a pouch in his lap, on which he kept one hand all the time. Maybe he had knuckle-bones in there, or stones.

Sophia nudged him.

‘I said, stop it,’ she hissed.

He stared at her, as though he had only just realized that she was there.

‘I can't,’ he whispered at last.

But he sidled a little further away from her along the bench, and next time made his noise more softly.

‘… Whereas the sun does
not
change its form, the moon
does
. We are now well into the last quarter of this moon. It will rise tonight, and the next night, but ever later and thinner. In a few days it will not rise at all. The world is creeping to the dark of the moon, and the dreary influences that stir in its shadow. What does this sign tell us? On the arc of Descent, the moon's shifting light shows us Truth
as men perceive it
– fitfully, and sometimes not at all.’

The fourth sign, thought Sophia wearily.

‘The fourth sign is Man …’

Ambrose lay in his narrow cell, at the end of his second day at Develin. The room was dark. He knew that beyond the thin boards of the partition by his ear lay another boy, and a pace beyond him another, and another, and so on all around him. And in other rooms of the castle, on and on, one after another: people, sighing and turning and sleeping. So many people! And almost all of them asleep.

Ambrose could not sleep.

He had placed the white stones around his pallet. He reached out and touched the nearest, to be sure it was still there.

He can't get me, he thought.

Someone was snoring. It was impossible to tell which bed the sound came from. He wondered if the masters patrolled down the dormitory, cane in hand, listening to the noises from each cell, so that they might burst in and thrash the offending scholar.

And in the morning everyone would rise, and get up and move about in these chains of rooms. So many people: voices, voices, and movement all around him, in a way he had never known before. And all the while he was trying to watch for someone he had barely seen, and listen for a voice that he could not hear.

Who had it been, passing under that archway? One of the masters? He did not know. What had the voice in the corridor been saying? He had not caught it.

Had there been someone behind him, when he had paused by the well?

For a moment he had been sure of it. For a moment.

He reached to touch a stone again. They were still there.

His thoughts wheeled slowly, drifting with images from the day: a boy who had asked him where he had come from. Another boy, who had laughed at the way he spoke; the master called Padry in the class today, saying that things stood for other things; the girl who had glared at him when he had clicked the stones.