The Crown of Dalemark (22 page)

When they camped that night, Wend said that Gardale was only a mile or so away, below in a valley they could not see.

It was odd, Maewen thought, that it had taken all this time to get that near, even coming straight through the center of the mountains. When she had driven here with Aunt Liss, it had only taken four hours, and that was with a detour on the way to look at Hannart. Her sense of distance was all confused.

Her sense of
everything
was all confused. She was dreading Gardale. Mitt was still being so distant and gruff that she knew she was not going to ask him to steal the Adon's cup for her. And Moril was younger than she was, and she was not going to ask him either. She would have to do it herself. But she still felt hurt at the way Mitt was behaving. She wanted to apologize, although she had no idea what she had done to annoy him. Perhaps they should all just go away and not bother about the cup.

No. Out of this muddle of thoughts came one thing that was clear—probably. Maewen and Aunt Liss had done the usual tourist thing and seen round the college at Gardale, where the old Lawschool was. Part of the Lawschool was the Chapel of the One. There had been—would be—a cup on the altar there, with a notice saying that this was only a replica of the cup that had been stolen two hundred years before. So it looked as if she had stolen—would be going to have stolen—the darned thing. In a mad, circular way, that meant she had to go down into Gardale and steal it because she already
had
.

It came on to rain. Oh, I give up! she thought.

Moril and Hestefan had the best of it. They vanished into the cart. The others draped the oilskin covers off their baggage over three large rocks and crawled underneath, where they spent a hot and sticky night, steamily full of the plopping and thrumming of rain. It was so uncomfortable that everyone woke and crawled out again at dawn. The rain stopped and became thinning mist, almost mockingly.

Maewen was clammy all over, and itchy, and—well—plain dirty. She could smell herself. She wanted to clean her teeth. But nobody seemed to bother about tooth cleaning any more than they appeared to worry about baths. At that moment Maewen felt she would have given her left ear and probably several toes as well for a nice hot bath full of rose-scented bath oil. And there was not even a hairbrush in her baggage roll! While Navis was shaving and Hestefan was clawing the kinks out of his beard, Maewen did what she could by taking her hair down from the little helmet, shaking it out and scratching hard at her scalp. Her hair smelled awful, of horse mostly, but dirty human hair was part of the smell, too.

“What wouldn't I give for a
bath
!” she said as she crammed the helmet back on her head.

“Me, too,” Mitt said, surprisingly, looking up from tightening the buckles on the Countess-horse. This was always a wary business, of circling and darting, in order not to get kicked or bitten, and he was glad to be distracted. “I never thought I'd live to hear myself say that,” he said. “But I got spoiled this last year in Aberath. Alk's got the whole place mined through with lead pipes and a furnace down in the dungeons. Water comes out boiling.”

A chuckle rose up in Maewen's throat. Things were all right again. Mitt was back in form. Now she could almost look forward to Gardale.

Mitt kept talking about Alk as they wound their slow way down into the valley. It matched a tender place in his mind where that promise to Alk was. So he was not sure why he was suddenly so cheerful. Maybe it was that the fog had gone. You could see mountains navy blue against pink dawn, peak after peak, right away to far-off Mount Tanil, which had a quiet feather of smoke coming out of its pointed head. Near to, there was still no sign of a valley—only a chasm of dark blue emptiness with mist boiling up out of it as if there were a giant version of one of Alk's Irons down there.

“I hear there's this great huge steam organ they have in Hannart,” he remarked, as the roiling, rising mist put him in mind of it.

Maewen nodded. She had seen the carefully preserved remains of that organ on that trip with Aunt Liss.

Maybe, Mitt considered, it was the sight just now of Noreth with her hair down from her helmet in long, frizzy clouds. Like that, she was the young lady he had felt so respectful to in her aunt's hall, so different and so far away from Mitt that it was silly to be awkward with her. Or maybe he was simply looking forward to seeing Hildy again.

The track that led down from the waystone was nothing like as grassy and well made as the green roads. Mostly it was rubble and raw earth and quite dangerously frayed at the edge of the great drop-off, where the mist heaved and rose. It led down in zigzags beside a furious stream of white water splayed over wet rocks, and at every hairpin bend, the cart threatened to come off and pitch into the depths. Hestefan led the mule. Everyone else took turns leaning on the outer side of the cart, boots braced in sliding gravel, either above white water or horrifying mist-filled steepness, helping to ease the cart round. When Maewen took her first turn, a nattering and honking above made her look up. There were white triangular splotches some bends overhead. The goosewoman seemed to have caught up.

The splotches and the noise came nearer every bend. “The geese get down here more easily,” Navis remarked to Mitt as they leaned side by side against the gold letters. Mitt laughed, and hoped they would not have to meet the goose-lady again.

As they slowly descended the track, the white stream enlarged into a mountain river roaring on a bed of green rocks, under a cliff hung with holly trees and small perilous rowans. The mist continued boiling its way upward as they went down. Somehow it had miraculously changed from mist to a proper cloud hovering against the upper crags. The sun caught it there and turned it to a cloud of gold film, with the green-black bones of the rock showing through. Everyone began to feel dry again at last.

About then Maewen caught sight of a woman standing on the other side of the loud green river. At least she thought she saw someone, between two of the rowan trees. But when she turned her head, there were only the two trees. She saw Mitt's head jerk, as if he had seen someone there, too. Then, as if he was struck by a sudden thought, Mitt turned his head back and up to look at the zigzags of the track above. Maewen looked, too. There was nothing up there. No gaggle of geese, no woman driving them. She could not even hear the geese chatting anymore.

They're out of sight on a bend, she thought.

Mitt thought, Libby Beer! Now what's she playing at?

Wend came hurrying down to the cart in a slide of small stones, unslinging the cwidder from his neck as he came. “Is it all right to give this back now?” he called to Maewen. “I'll have to leave you for a while. I'll wait for you by the waystone south of Gardale Valley.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Maewen said, rather taken aback. “What if we take all day, though?”

“I'll wait,” Wend promised, handing the cwidder to Moril. Moril settled it on his knees, and quite a weight of responsibility with it, from the look of him. They went on down. The last Maewen saw of Wend, before a shoulder of the hill hid him, he was leaping in great, splashing strides across the river.

Going to see that lady, Maewen thought. She
was
there, then.

At the next bend of the path Wend vanished from her mind. The path came out above the great green wedge shape of the Gardale Valley, with Gardale Town nestled into the pointed end just below them, seemingly at their toes, a mass of smoking chimney stacks. Maewen was astonished. She had known the place was bound to be smaller, but not
this
small! It was more like a large village than a town.

Two more turns of the road brought them into green meadows outside the town, and Maewen still marveled. She knew it was absurd, but she had been expecting the high blocks of buildings and the tall shops she had seen on her visit with Aunt Liss. This Gardale was all low. The houses were all built of greenish stone, and none was more than three stories high. The amount of smoke from all those chimneys astonished her. The track suddenly turned into a proper road paved with the same greenish stone and took them across a bridge over the same river, now flowing quietly and more brown than green, between stone walls where small boys sat fishing.

After that they were in the main street, and Maewen could hardly breathe. It's like a foreign country! she thought. There were crowds of people. She had thought she had become used to being in the past. Now she knew she had only become used to the people traveling with her and the way those five people dressed and talked. Everyone who crowded the street here seemed to have more lines on their faces—or fewer—as if they all worried about different things from those that concerned people in Maewen's own time. This set their faces into quite another shape, like people who spoke a foreign language. As to their clothes, the hearthman's livery she had grown used to was the rarest kind here. The men wore bright wools and sober velvets in any number of styles, from tight-fitting suits with a colored blanket thing folded over one shoulder, through the looser sorts of clothes that Moril or Hestefan wore, to the elderly fellow pushing past in a long dark blue velvet robe with a jeweled chain round his neck. The women were in so many styles and colors—nipped waists, loose pleats, long flounces, calf-length gathers—that even when Maewen saw the outfit was homemade and probably redyed from another color, they still made her feel dowdy and wrongly dressed. The place smelled of people and, almost chokingly, of smoke with, underneath that, most definitely cesspits.

“It seems very busy,” Navis remarked. “Market day?”

“That and more, I rather think,” Hestefan said. People had seen his cart by then and were pressing up to it all round, wanting to know when the Singer would perform. Hestefan enlarged his voice, in the Singer's way, so that though he seemed to be speaking normally, his voice rang round the street. “In the market square in an hour's time.”

“Oh but—” Moril started to say. Then he saw faces turning and nodding eagerly. He gave up.

“What are our plans?” Navis asked Maewen. They were down to a slow walk, boot to boot, as they pressed through the crowd.

“Go to the college—Lawschool,” Maewen said.

“That suits me,” Navis said, and he bent to the nearest person to ask the way.

It was out on the other side of the town. They had to go through the market square, where there was a frenzy of buying and selling going on, and such shouting mixed with smells of new bread, fruit, leather, and cattle dung to add to the cesspit smell that Maewen's stomach began to feel unhappy. Hestefan cast a professional eye over the chaos and agreed with Moril that they would have time to visit the Lawschool before people were ready to listen. So the whole party continued, out through the farther end of the market square and down another street, to where the crowds and then the houses quite abruptly stopped and the street became a white dirt road leading across more green fields. There were animals—cows, goats, and a donkey or so—tethered out in the fields, but the only other people in sight were a small party of horsemen some distance ahead on the road.

“Hannart livery,” Navis said. He and Mitt exchanged a significant, worried look. “I think we'll let them get well ahead.”

That suited Maewen. In these times Hannart was a name to conjure with. As everyone reined in and hung back at the mule's slowest pace, she looked anxiously at the horsemen until they vanished behind a clump of trees. “Do you think someone told the Earl of Hannart that the Adon's ring was stolen?” she asked Mitt.

“I don't
reckon
so,” Mitt said, almost equally worried.

“I'll give a false name,” Maewen said, “if anyone asks.”

“A wise precaution,” Navis agreed. “At times like this I could wish Mitt and I were not so obviously Southerners.”

The Hannart horsemen had vanished by the time they came round the clump of trees and saw the Lawschool. Maewen had another moment of sheer surprise. She had known the school would have to be the oldest part of the college she and Aunt Liss had visited, but she had expected that this would be the part with all the towers and tall, pointed windows. She had not expected it would be these low, graceful greenish buildings topped with clusters of long, stylish chimneys. The windows were wide, one and all, and they had diamond panes. In the middle, an elegant archway filled by a wrought-iron gate joined two blocks of the buildings together. The rest were joined by a high stone wall.

“Looks a good place for studying,” Mitt said. He tried to smile, but he knew his face had gone pinched and worried. Those Hannart riders were inside. He could glimpse horses between the bars of the gate.

By the time they reached the gate, there was nothing to be seen through it but a garden and a cobbled path leading away between lavender bushes. An official walked to the middle of the gate. Maewen bit the inside of her mouth, or she would have laughed. He was wearing exactly the same uniform that the porters at the college wore in her day: baggy knee-length breeches and tunic in dark blue, with a wide white collar. It was obviously old-fashioned even two hundred years before that. He had bad teeth. She saw them as he spoke.

“Visitors for Sending Day? Which of the scholars are you for?”

Navis hesitated a fraction because of those riders from Hannart. “Hildrida Navissdaughter,” he said, with a shrug you could only have seen if you knew him.