The Widow and the King (62 page)

‘Save
him
?’ cried Ambrose. And he jabbed his finger at Aun as if to pin him against the courtyard wall.

‘I'm saving
you
!’

There was a moment's silence.

‘You know,’ said Hob.

‘I think he has a point.’

‘Which is more than you have!’ Aun lifted his sword. Hob looked down at his shattered blade, and shrugged.

‘Straight back to the iron, is it, Lackmere? After the King has spoken?’

Aun glared at him, and Hob met his look. It was Aun who dropped his eyes at last. He turned away to stare across the valley at the mountains under their shroud. His head and shoulders were set, like rocks; but he said nothing.

‘Let him go, Endor,’ Ambrose said.

Endor stepped back. Slowly Raymonde got to his feet. He drew breath to say something. What could he say? I'm sorry? I didn't mean it? Nothing passed his lips.

Abruptly he turned and strode from the courtyard with his mail clinking and his left arm cradled across his chest. The sound of his feet receded.

Ambrose let out his breath. It seemed to be over. It really was over. Aun might never forgive him for what he had done, but he was going to be bound by it. And at his feet …

His legs carried him down the steps once more to stand over the body of his enemy.

‘Is he really dead?’

Hob looked down.

‘Oh, yes. Very.’

In death, Prince Paigan, son of Wulfram, looked much older. His hairless head was mottled like the skin of a frog. The eyes were sunk in deep pits in his face, and in the dusk the whites gleamed below lowered lids. The back of the head and one shoulder had been deeply gashed from Raymonde's sword. There had been very little blood.

Hob rubbed his jaw. ‘Damned if the old fox didn't have us all spellbound at the end. Maybe it's as well things happened as they did.’

‘We should bury him,’ said Ambrose.

‘Bury him? Dig up rocks? Not likely. And I'm not piling stones half the night for him either. We could burn him, if we had the wood.’

‘There's wood in the storerooms in the outer courtyard. I could …’

‘No. You go back and find the others, if you can. Tell them it's over, and they can come down. They'll be glad to hear it, I guess.’

Ambrose had almost forgotten the rest of the Company, arrayed by the stones above the pool. He wondered if Mother had brought them out by now. It was strange to think of them so near, and yet in another place where blood had no colour and from which no cry would carry.

‘And take Endor with you, just in case. Lackmere and I will do what's necessary here.’

Aun was standing by the low wall of the courtyard, looking over at the unseen hillside below as if some vision or memory of a vision confronted him from the rubbled slope. He did not seem to have heard. But Ambrose understood that Hob was arranging things so that he could talk
to Aun alone. He must want to be sure that Aun would indeed be bound by the word of the new King. Perhaps that, too, was the kind of thing he would have done for Ambrose's father.

Ambrose did not think it was necessary; but he was grateful all the same.

He looked down once more at the crumpled figure at his feet. It was such a mean end, he thought, after all that he had been.

‘You could put him on the throne and burn him like that, maybe,’ he said.

‘It would be right.’

‘We'd never get enough wood under him. And it's more than he deserves. No, we'll find a flat spot outside the gates, I guess.’ Hob rubbed his jaw again. ‘No point in dirtying a throne, after all. That
is
yours, now – Prince Under the Sky.’

mbrose dreamed that he was in Develin again. He was passing through the empty house, opening door after door, and finding no one. He was walking through the courts of his mountain home, which had somehow come to be in Develin, and no one was there. The fountain was still. The throne was empty.

He was late, and he could not find the man he was looking for.

Only in the last building, in a wall where it should not have been, did he find the door to the scholars' hall. It was shut. The iron ring, pitted and weathered, hung before his hand.

He opened it, and walked in.

The benches were empty. He went to the last one and sat down.

The master stood at the far end of the hall, facing him. He wore a grey robe, with his hood thrown forward around his face. Ambrose did not want to see that face. He knew what it would look like: very old, with eyes deep-sunk and the whites showing below lowered lids,
and the mouth half-open in his last and sudden pain. He waited.

The Angels lie
, said the ghost of Prince Paigan.

In the mountain sunrise he stood with his mother and with Aun, on the cliff above the pool.

‘He was tricked,’ he said. ‘The Angels tricked him. And they tricked us, too.’

She laughed. ‘Umbriel and all his brothers, tricksters? Do you wish to set the Church by the ears? What makes you think he was tricked?’

‘They told him that the last of his father's sons would bring him down. We all thought that meant me. But I'm not the last of his father's sons – not of Wulfram's own sons.
He
was. He was the youngest of them. They meant him. He did it to himself !’

‘But he was killed because you came to overthrow him. You did it.’

‘I had nothing to do with it! He'd caught me! He was getting me to take his place. He was trying to make the prophecy come true in a way which would mean that he was still the real King. But he had already shamed Raymonde, tricked him, led him to kill all those people. He would not let Raymonde have the cup, and he killed the man Raymonde had made King. Then he stood with his back to Raymonde, and offered me the cup, his throne – everything he had let Raymonde think should be his. He was so sure that I was the one who was supposed to bring him down. In the end it was his own servant who did it. So really, he did it to himself.’

At the end of the ridge a faint column of smoke
stained the morning air. Paigan's pyre must have burned all night. They had built it from wood that his own hands had gathered, day in, day out through the summer. He had never dreamed what it would be used for. He hoped that it had burned hot enough to do its work.

She laughed again.

Around them the Company of the Moon were beginning to gather their belongings. Orcrim had judged that it would be better not to try to bring the horses or the wounded Caw down to the house in the half-darkness. He had also insisted on keeping watch by the ring, just in case the masterless creatures within it still wanted to attack. So they had made a precarious camp above the cliffs and sat out the night among horses which could smell water but had had nothing to drink since noon. Orcrim had forbidden any attempt to raid the pool.

It was bad ground for horses, up here. The barren undulations over which they had fought the creatures had become the steep, thorny slopes that Ambrose had lived among as long as he could remember. Even leading the beasts down to the track would be tricky work. He supposed that his mother could take the Company down to easier ground by passing through the world of the Cup once more, but no one would want to do that unless they had to.

Only the pool itself was the same – the pool, and the broken ring of stones around it. The same dark water sat still in the bottom of the cup the mountains had made for it. The same stones, like fists or teeth stood or leaned in their places. The stone they had been trying to raise remained propped with one end lifted perhaps a foot from
the ground. The little boulders on which it rested seemed to be no more than rocks from the hillside, which had somehow crept in there.

Aun kicked at the stone and scowled. Ambrose thought he must hate to hear his son spoken of. But Mother laughed – she was laughing a lot, this morning – and put her hand on the baron's shoulder.

‘You have made Aun angry with me,’ she said. ‘And Orcrim will be angry, too. For I had told them both that the Angels meant you should be victorious. Neither would have followed us so willingly if they had realized we were just the cat's paw.’

‘Do this, camp here, fight him – I was the monkey man led by his own monkey!’ growled Aun.

‘A monkey you have made King – or Prince at least.’ She seemed happy to tease all the world, today. ‘What have you done with your crown, my darling? Not lost already, I hope?’

‘It's in my pack,’ Ambrose said.

He had taken it out and turned it in his hands in the mountain dawn, but had not wanted to put it on. The memory of the head that had worn it for three hundred years still lingered within its simple ring. It lay in the bottom of the sack that he was carrying.

‘And what kind of king will you be, my darling?’

‘I don't know.’

Paigan had told him the truth, he felt. As a king he must do evil, or die. Most likely he would do both.

‘I should like to see the crown, and the cup, please.’

Ambrose dropped his sack upon the ground and picked them out of it.

‘Aun,’ she said. ‘I think you have the book.’

‘I was charged with it again, yesterday,’ he said. ‘For the second time. And I was not asked whether I wanted it.’

‘Could you bring it, please, and let us discuss what should be done.’

Aun brought his hands out from within his cloak. They held a small, heavy book, bound in leather and iron.

‘I have trusted it to lock and bar before, and both failed me,’ he said. ‘If I must watch over this damned thing again, it will not leave me until I go to the Angels.’

‘And we shall raise a window to you in every chapel in the land – to the Knight who carries a Book that he can let no one read, and that he himself cannot. But I think this charge may be a short one. Give me the book first, then … Now, Ambrose, my darling. This is your father's record of all the things that he thought and did with the power that Paigan Wulframson gave to him. If you have wondered what kind of a man he was, you will find a great part of the answer on these pages. I have looked in it once, and found much there I wanted to read, of myself and of him. Perhaps there are things written in it about you, too, for he knew you as a small child. But the only man living who has read in full what lies on these pages is Raymonde of Lackmere, and what he found there set him on the path to the things he did. What shall we do with this book?’

‘Destroy it,’ said Aun.

Ambrose hesitated. His father's book! He did not want to destroy it – not before he had read it. He guessed that Mother did not wish to either. But the meaning of what she had said was clear; and he owed Aun much.

‘We should destroy it,’ he said.

At once she held it out at arm's length over the cliff. She seemed to weigh it in her hand, perhaps to sigh. Then she tossed it out into the air. It turned as it fell, and did not open, but hit the water in the very centre of the pool with a splash and disappeared.

‘Gone,’ she said.

Gone – the last trace of his father, on a few words he had uttered in doubt. There would always be a piece missing.

‘The crown next,’ she said.

‘I want to destroy that, too,’ said Ambrose.

‘Why?’ said Aun.

‘Why?’ said Mother.

‘Kings cause evil.’

He saw Aun frown.

‘Ambrose,’ said Mother. ‘We know you do not wish to be a king, such as Velis was, or even Septimus. Nor do you wish to be like Raymonde, who played games with crowns. But this is not the crown of Tuscolo. It is the crown of a power that is hidden.’

‘
He
wore it. And those creatures from the pool – they wore crowns like it. I do not want to become him, or them.’

‘Gold is gold,’ said Aun.

‘It's a sign, like any other. You were happy to ride here under the Doubting Moon, though men have been cursing it as a sign for a hundred years.’ ‘It means I have to have power – even if it's hidden, somehow. I don't want that.’

‘Power is not evil,’ she said. ‘Power is choice, although often the choice must be between evil and greater evil.’

‘Not to choose power can also bring evil,’ said Aun. ‘Or to let it happen when it should not.’

Aun, I'm your King. Stop!

Ambrose looked at his mother, but she said nothing. They were both waiting for him.

‘He's right,’ he said wearily. ‘I've already chosen it.’

If he renounced it, Aun might start hunting Raymonde again. Paigan had spoken the truth about that, too.

‘Very well,’ said Mother. ‘But now – or soon – you will need to choose what that means. What kind of a king would you be, if you could?’

‘I don't know! Help me!’

‘You're scared,’ said Aun. ‘Rightly. Most men who go hunting crowns end up losing their heads. But as things stand in the Kingdom, Orcrim and I judge that we could offer you the keys of Tuscolo in twelve months. And if we wait too long, somebody else will get them.’

Castles? Thrones?

Ambrose shook his head.

‘I'm the Prince Under the Sky.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Aun.

‘I don't know. I need to think about it.’

‘Who will you rule?’

‘I don't know!’

‘Who does the Prince Under the Sky rule?’ asked Mother.