The Widow and the King (14 page)

‘But this king – I can see he's going to be a handful. I could be his friend one day, and called a traitor the next. I might be looking for someone better, soon. And if you can show you're Wulfram's stock, that would swing some scales.’

Ambrose sat quite still, trying to understand what the man meant. Someone better? Someone from Wulfram's line – to be King?

‘No,’ he said at last.

‘No?’ The man smiled.

‘You can do more than that, little Wulf,’ he said easily. ‘I'm being a friend to you. I could be your only way of staying alive.’

Ambrose clenched his jaw. He could hear the threat. But now he could think, too.

Wulf ? Wolf yourself !

‘I mean it,’ said the man. ‘You're being hunted, didn't you know? Those fellows who came down on Chatterfall the other night – they're still on your trail. They've been given good reasons for wanting to catch you. We stirred up a regular hornet's nest after you there. How do you think you're going to get away – two of you on one horse, and a big, white one at that, which will stand out a mile in any country?’

Ambrose met his eye. The only way the enemy would know about Stefan was if this man had told them.

He didn't want to kill Ambrose. He didn't want to slit Wastelands's throat. But he wouldn't mind if somebody else did it for him.

Wolf yourself!

The man must have seen what he was thinking. He scowled.

‘Come on. You need me. I don't need you. And if I did, I could just take you.’

His knife was in his hand again. Ambrose drew breath.

‘After what you've done?’ he said deliberately.

‘What's that supposed to mean?’ said the man sharply.

‘You killed my mother.’

The man was silent. Then he said: ‘Don't be stupid …’

‘You killed my mother,’ Ambrose repeated. ‘And Aunt Evalia.’

He knew the man had been sorry. So he knew his words would hurt. They were the only way of hurting
that he had. And he didn't care about the knife any more.

‘Damn it, I didn't mean that she should fall …’

‘You
killed
her!’

The man swore. He seized Ambrose by the shoulder and dragged him to his feet. Ambrose clenched his teeth for the knife-blow. It did not come.

The man released him. They stood, inches apart, glaring at one another. At the far end of the chapel Wastelands was stirring, mumbling, ‘What – what?’ in his blankets.

If you say anything, Ambrose thought, I'll say it again. I'll shout it. I'll run after you screaming it in your ear. Call me a wolf ? You're the Wolf ! That's what you are!

‘
Sorry
,’ said the Wolf savagely, and turned away.

And he walked through the wall.

For a moment Ambrose thought that the light had grown. There was a sudden deadness to the air, as if it gave no echoes. Before him Ambrose glimpsed a landscape of brown rocks under dull light – some place completely different from the silver-and-dark aisles of the chapel around him. He saw the man beginning to pick his way through the rocks that could not be where they seemed to be. Then the chapel wall rose in front of him again, blank and patched with moonlight. The man was gone.

‘What's all the noise?’ growled Wastelands in a voice heavy with sleep.

Ambrose stood by the altar with his heart beating hard. He wondered how close the man – the
Wolf
– had come to stabbing him. For a moment Ambrose had almost wanted him to. But the Wolf had hated to be reminded of what he had done. And he had gone.

Gone? Where? Into a dream, Mother had once said.
He could do that because the Heron Man had given him water from the pool. That was how he had appeared so suddenly.

The Heron Man must be able to do that, too.

If the ‘Wolf ‘ could find Ambrose, so could the Heron Man.

As fast as he could Ambrose limped back down the aisle to huddle within the ring of pebbles. Some of them had been displaced. Angrily he jammed them back into their ring.

‘What's the matter there?’ Wastelands growled.

He had lifted his head and was looking at Ambrose. In the moon-shadows his head was a shape, and no more. It was the same shape as the Wolf ‘s had been. It could almost have been the Wolf, lying there. Wastelands was like the Wolf, who was his own son. And he wanted to kill him.

The moonbeams lanced through the high chapel windows and fell around him. He sat bolt upright in the ring of stones with his eyes wide.

Sleep? Ambrose thought he would never sleep again, if he could help it.

What if the Wolf changed his mind, and came back to stab him? What if the Heron Man came? What if Wastelands woke properly – what would he do? He wanted to kill his son, just like Ambrose's father. Only the Heron Man could have made him want that.

So the Heron Man had caught Wastelands, too.

The Heron Man was everywhere. He touched everybody. The pebbles kept him away, but what use was that when he could whisper to a man and send him stealing out of a dream to put a knife at Ambrose's neck?

He was like a huge shadow, looking down into the world, standing still, still, until it struck. And where it struck, lives wriggled and went out like fish in a heron's beak. One after another, they went out suddenly and without warning: Uncle Adam; Aunt Evalia; Mother. So suddenly. So meaninglessly.

Ambrose sat sleepless, and thought about his mother. She had known everything, it seemed. She had comforted him. She had given him everything that he had had: everything he had eaten; everything he had learned; everything he had played with.

‘I could have done it with my old one, in my father's house at Trant. I should have made this one better.’

‘Why didn't you?’

In her father's house at Trant. And here he was, in the ruin of her father's house. He wished that he hadn't spoken to her like that.

The moonbeams inched imperceptibly across the stones of the chapel. Where the light fell on the wall beside him there was a word all on its own.
Ina
. Ambrose thought it was a girl's name. He had no idea how long she had lived, or what kind of person she had been. He knew nothing about these people, or this place which must once have been his mother's home. She would have done. Now it was a shell: all dead, all gone like her.

Ina
, said the silent stone in the moonlight.

At last he picked up one of his own white pebbles and drew it across the stonework. It left a faint white line. Then he began.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. The sound of the stone scraping was loud in that quiet place. Stroke by stroke, forming the letters as she had taught him, he carved her name on the wall beside that of her dead sister.

Phaedra.

is fears followed him the next day, and grew as the hours passed. His eyes searched the flat, treeless land as they rode on under the grey sky. The wind blew at them, tugging at the knight's coat and throwing fine dust against Ambrose's cheek. His vision blurred with it, and still he stared and craned around him. He felt that he should be seeing something that was not there to be seen.

He could picture it quite clearly in his mind's eye: the figure of a man in a grey robe – not at a poolside now, but as seen across the level grasslands with its cloak flapping like a scarecrow on a winter's afternoon. Maybe it was moving towards him. Maybe it was still. But it should be there; and it wasn't.

Not seeing it was worst of all.

Around noon the skies began to clear. The track led them past a living farm, and across a broad valley they could see first a hamlet and then a manor house, all with their roofs whole. In the mid-afternoon they came upon a large village, crouching within its stockade in the valley bottom. At its gates crowds of people were moving around
a collection of animal pens. Carts and awnings were set about, with men and women selling things from them. Wastelands left Ambrose to hold Stefan and went into the fair looking for horse-meal and food for themselves.

Ambrose watched the people buying food from the woman at the nearest cart. At another time he would have been curious. He had used coins only once, when he had thrust the whole of his mother's purse at the old man who lived by the lake, and had asked to be taken across the water. Here, he saw that each coin had a value, and that people counted them out carefully – so much for a plucked hen, and so much for a rabbit – and argued over what each purchase was worth. He even thought he saw the woman bite the coins she had been offered.

But he did not want to go close enough to be sure. He kept looking about him, watching the people as they passed; and especially those who wore hoods, or whose faces he could not see.

The wind blew up the valley, silvering the grasses. Ambrose stood with Stefan, big and reassuring beside him, and waited for Wastelands to return. He did not trust Wastelands – that angry, half-evil man – and after what the Wolf had said Ambrose felt more wary of him still. And yet he disliked Wastelands less than he disliked being alone. As time went on and Wastelands did not appear, he became nervous.

His hand stole to the pouch at his belt. Through the cloth he felt the stones within it.
Click
, they went. It was a reassuring sound. He did it again.
Click
.

Feet sounded, running through the crowd. It was
Wastelands, hurrying up to him with his mail clinking as he came.

‘Mount up, quickly!’

He was empty-handed and breathing hard. Something had alarmed him. He lifted Ambrose, who swarmed gratefully into his perch. The knight heaved himself up behind him. People had turned to stare at them.

‘Let's move!’

Wastelands urged the horse into a trot, looking back as he rode.

‘What's the matter?’ asked Ambrose.

‘We've been seen. At least, I was.’

‘Who?’

‘No friend of mine – or yours, for that matter.’

There was a long, steady rise in the track. Wastelands checked his mount beneath the ridge, looking behind him again. Ambrose could see the road running back along the valley to the village and the cluster of dots that was the fair. It seemed to him that some of the dots had spilled down the road towards them. They were moving. They might have been men riding. At that distance, Ambrose could not tell how many they were.

‘They will see us for sure as we cross the ridge,’ said Wastelands. ‘And we are two, on one tired horse. It only wants some of them to be well mounted. But there's nothing for it.’

They surged forward over the skyline. The noise of Stefan's hooves, harness and clinking iron battered at Ambrose's ears, and he heard nothing of the distant pursuit.

A furlong after crossing the ridge Wastelands turned off the road. The thorns and scrub were low, and gave
little cover for a moving horse, but he found a coombe of dead ground, and they threaded their way along it, emerging cautiously and then cantering across open land to find more cover. They saw no one. They followed the low ground among pathless rises, almost doubling back on the line of their journey, because that was where the cover took them. An hour later they crossed another ridge, and Wastelands seemed to relax in the saddle. Still he rode as they had done that first day after leaving Chatterfall, staying off paths and watching the land for enemies. Ambrose watched, too, for a cluster of black dots on the move, but above all for a lonely figure in grey who might walk at his very elbow without being seen.

Unless he knew how to look, the Wolf had said. He was not sure that he did know.

The afternoon wore away. The enemy did not reappear. On a hilltop in the shelter of a stand of trees Wastelands abruptly stopped the horse.

‘Better rest him while we can,’ he said. ‘We may need everything he has before long.’ They dismounted, drank water, ate their last dried fruit and unrolled their blankets, but Wastelands did not start a fire and did not take the saddle off Stefan's back.

Ambrose crouched in his ring of pebbles. There was no wind, and no sound at all but Stefan grazing what he could from the heathy ground. Wastelands sat wrapped in his blanket with his back to a tree and closed his eyes. Ambrose looked at him: this man who must be in part the enemy's man, and yet was the only help to be had. He thought it strange that someone like that could be tired.

‘What did you see?’ asked Ambrose suddenly.

‘A man called Caw,’ said Wastelands. ‘One of a band of outlaws. They were knights and fighters for your father: consorts of his witchcraft, and they still wear the Doubting Moon badge. They'll be the ones who attacked Chatterfall. That was three, four nights ago. So someone's made them want you badly, for them to have kept to our trail so from their own country. Good tracking. Ve-ery good tracking,’ he added, as if he thought there might be some more sinister explanation.

‘Are they men?’ Ambrose said.

‘Yes – what did you think they were?’ said Wastelands sharply. But at the same time his eyes searched Ambrose's face as if he thought Ambrose might indeed know more than he did.