The Prince in Waiting, Page 8

  Martin and Edmund and I quarreled often enough during this drab confining time, but we remained friends. I cannot speak for their feelings but I had great need of them, with my father withdrawn into a private misery, and my own thoughts wretched enough. Strangely, the impulse to go to the house in the River Road, an impulse which had disappeared in the summer and autumn, came back now at intervals, quite unexpectedly. Doing some ordinary thing, I would think of going there, hearing my aunt’s sharp voice bidding me wipe my feet, sitting down to dinner at the little table in the poky room. Then I would remember that all this was past, and how it had ended, and would feel a pain like the twisting of a knife in my chest. The pain went quicker if the others were by.

  And Edmund was more willing to come to the palace than he had been. It was as though what had happened dissolved his resentments. My father, as anyone could see by looking at him, had paid a heavy penalty for becoming Prince. I don’t think Edmund took any joy in this. He had changed from a hatred of him, which could not be hidden even though unexpressed, to a different feeling, almost one of admiration.

  He said one day, about Peter:

  “Does he ever visit your father, Luke?”

  I said truthfully: “My father receives few visitors.”

  “But Peter?”

  “No.”

  He had not been to the palace since his release. I myself had seen him once or twice in the Citadel, going about his duties as Captain, but we had not spoken. Edmund said:

  “He was fortunate.”

  I had not spoken to them or anyone about my meeting with my aunt and my plea to my father for Peter. I doubted, in any case, whether my words had turned a scale. My father’s circle of affection was small and he had lost two from it already; he would not have wished to forfeit a third unless it were forced on him.

  I said: “He had no part in it.”

  “There are some who think differently. He usually slept in the palace, but not that night.”

  “Because he was on duty in the Citadel. My aunt knew that.”

  “And I’ve heard it said he was against questioning the polymuf, insisting he was a madman who had acted on his own.”

  “I was there,” I said. “It was a remark, no more. It meant nothing and there was no insisting.”

  We were in the east wing of the palace, in a parlor on the first floor. It was a part that had been left empty and unpainted for many years. The walls were dingy and cracked: Strohan, the palace butler, had asked my father if he should set the polymufs to decorating them but had been told no. Edmund and I were playing chess. Martin, who in any case was too good for either of us, was reading a book. He looked up from it, and said:

  “The city is full of rumors. Being penned in, people have nothing to do but talk.”

  “And mostly nonsense,” I said.

  “Yet it is worth listening to it,” Edmund said. “Even if it is nonsense, it is often useful to know what kind of nonsense men believe.”

  I accepted that, surprised only that he should have said it. But he had changed in the past months, as we all had. He thought more, and more deeply. And although we were friends I knew I did not have all the secrets of his mind, any more than he had mine.

  Martin said: “People even say he is turning Christian.”

  I asked in surprise: “Peter?”

  “He has been seen with them.”

  “If he does,” Edmund said, “you are safe, Luke. Christians may not kill, and so he could not take revenge.”

  “Revenge?” I asked. “For what?”

  “For a mother burned in the market square. It is not something one forgets. They say your father is a fool to have spared him. I don’t think so. I think he knows his own strength. He is like a dog I once saw come into a pack that were snarling and fighting. The pack made way for him and when he turned his back on them, though together they could have fallen on him and killed him, they dared not even show their teeth. But you may need to take more care.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Still, if he turns Christian it makes it easier. And he would have to give up his Captaincy.”

  “That shows what moonshine it is! He would never surrender his sword.”

  Martin, while we were talking, had left his book and strolled restlessly about the room. He stopped in front of a picture which hung on the wall. It was very old and showed animals in cages, but like no animals we had ever seen. There was one that was tawny in color, shaped something like a cat but with a mane behind its head; and judging by the size of a man in the picture at least a hundred times bigger than any cat could be. Another, roughly resembling a man, was hideously ugly with receding head and chin, hairy and tailed. And near the cages a second man walked what might have been a horse except that it was covered with black and white stripes.

  Martin said: “This must be from before the Disaster. And yet they say that the polymufs, both beasts and men, only came after the Disaster, as a punishment for the wickedness of our Ancestors.”

  “It may not be from before the Disaster,” Edmund said. “We don’t know how old it is.”

  “But there are polymuf beasts in it, full grown, and men with them, so in any case something is wrong.”

  “They may be only the imaginings of a painter,” I suggested.

  “They don’t look like imaginings.”

  Edmund said: “Take it to Ezzard and ask him.”

  “He would destroy it probably. I should think it has only survived because no Seer has noticed it.”

  “Take care when you speak of the Seer,” Edmund said, “or you will never be accepted as an Acolyte.”

  The joke was long threadbare but we all laughed. We needed something to laugh at.

  • • •

  One day, during the period of easier weather, the time when the clowns and musicians and jugglers were leaving the city, the thought of the house in the River Road came on me again, a joy and a pain together. I was on my own in the lower part of the city, below the Buttercross. I had been meaning to go across the river to the Armory but on the impulse I changed my direction. I walked the familiar street where I had not been for so long. The polymufs had cleared the High Street of snow but here it still lay, packed in the center, at the sides drifted against the houses. I came to her house and stared at it. Steps had been cut before this door as before the rest, and smoke rose from the chimney. I wondered who lived there now, but I did not care. The journey had done me no good; I would have been better staying away.

  I turned to go and found him almost on me: the snow had muffled his footsteps. We looked at each other, for the first time really since the fire, and I saw the deeper lines in his face, the marks of grief and long brooding. He said:

  “Health, Luke. You have come to see me?”

  I said stupidly: “To see you? Here? You live here?”

  “Why not? It is my home.”

  As we both knew, he had left it last summer to join my father in the palace, at the time when Aunt Mary refused the offer of a bigger house. I had assumed that from the palace he had gone to live in the Lines, with the other unmarried Captains.

  I said: “You have no woman to tend you.”

  “I have the maids.”

  “Polymufs . . .”

  He shrugged. “They see to things.”

  It was unheard of for a man, except sometimes when bereaved and old, to live without human care and companionship, of wife, mother, sister—some womanly relation. It showed how badly he had taken things that he should do so; and made the notion of him turning Christian just a little less incredible. But even apart from the solitariness, how could he bear to go on living with such memories as the house must continually call to mind? I found it bad enough to have to look at the snow-topped ruins of the palace’s north wing. To be in the house—listen to the ticking of the clock she wound each night, look at the plants in pots of which she had been so proud—was to seek pain which anyone in his right mind would shun.

  While I h
esitated, trying to think of something to say, he said:

  “Are you coming in?”

  “No. I have . . . someone to see.”

  We looked at each other. I do not know what he thought—that I had come to gloat, perhaps—but I knew there was nothing I could say which would bridge the chasm between us. We called each other cousin, and in fact were half brothers. We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.

  • • •

  Winter ended at last in a thaw accompanied by rain storms which made the river flood its banks; the waters rose at one point to lap against the block of stone in the High Street which still carried the broken legs of what had been a statue—of a great Prince of ancient times, it was said. But when the rains stopped and the west wind died away there was fitful sunlight and everywhere the trees began to bud, bursting into green as though to make up for time lost.

  It was the Spring Fair again, and the Contest. Not a good one: the favorite was Mark Greene and he won without much difficulty and took the jeweled sword. I sat with the spectators, my own sword hanging from my belt, and heard people talk about how much better the Contest had been last year. They said flattering things and I made awkward replies. Later Edmund, who had sat with me, said:

  “One would think you did not like praise, you receive it so awkwardly.”

  “I like the thought of it,” I said, “but the reality makes me uneasy.”

  He smiled. “You must learn to overcome that. Or at least not to show it.”

  “Praise is worth having from a few. Those whose judgment one values.”

  “And if I tell you it was a better Contest last year?”

  We laughed. I said: “And would have been better still with a different ending?”

  “True enough!” He paused. “If I had not underrated you as I did . . . I fought it over in my mind often enough afterward and knew I could have beaten you. I would have liked a second chance.”

  “There are no second chances.”

  “Not in the Contest, I agree.”

  “Not in anything that matters.”

  He shook his head. “I will not accept that, Luke. I will never accept it.”

  It was at this time that my father roused himself from the torpor which had held him for so many months. Orders were given and obeyed. The ruins of the north wing were cleared away by polymufs, and after them came builder dwarfs and there was sawing of wood and hammering of nails all day. Others worked on the rest of the palace, mending and cleaning and painting.

  Nor was that the end of the city’s new activity. The dwarfs were also busy in the Armory and at harness-making. People had said that with the Prince sunk in melancholy there would be no fighting this year. Now they knew differently. He still did not smile but he seemed possessed by a fury that drove him toward action. He was up at daybreak and busy all day making preparations for the campaign. In the middle of April the army rode out to the southwest.

  I rode with them. Not, it is true, as a warrior, though I wore my sword, but as assistant to the Sergeant in charge of the camp followers. These were the men who looked after the Prince and the Captains in the field, putting up tents, seeing to equipment, cooking and so on. It was work which in the city would have been done by polymufs but no army took polymufs with it even as menials. These were men unfit for one reason or another to be warriors but glad enough to go with the army, for pickings or maybe just for the excitement. They were a rough lot and unruly when they were in drink but the Sergeant, a gray-bearded man called Burke, with a limp that came from an old sword wound, ruled them well.

  We made up a baggage train, the gear loaded on carts pulled by mules. We did not always take the same route as the army—the mules were sure-footed but the carts themselves could not always go where horses could. It was particularly true on this campaign, for we were riding against Petersfield which lay in a fold on the far side of the Downs. The ground to be traversed was hilly and often rough. We made our way to appointed places and worked hard, having a longer road to travel.

  I learned a lot, from the best way of sleeping on hard ground with only a single blanket to keep out the cold to the techniques of killing and skinning and jointing a bullock: once we were out of our own territory we lived, as raiding armies always did, on the land we were invading. I had thought myself fit but soon became much fitter. My hands were first sore then calloused from the labors of mule-driving, loading and unloading, hauling on ropes to free carts whose wheels were stuck in the mud. I wished often enough that I could be with the main body of the army, riding high up across the shoulder of a hill while we struggled along beneath them, but this at any rate was better than being left with the garrison in the city.

  Our boundary followed the river as far north as West Meon. It was there the army crossed, taking the broader southerly route through the Downs, and I looked on foreign fields for the first time in my life. They seemed no different from our own, growing wheat and potatoes, very few with cattle. (Dairy farming was for the most part carried on in parts closer to the cities, where the beasts were not so vulnerable to raiders.) We passed through a hamlet less than a mile inside the border. Its single street was empty, the windows tight shuttered on the houses, silent except for a dog barking somewhere out of sight. But we knew that eyes would be watching us, and that the pigeons would be in flight, carrying word of our coming to Petersfield.

  The battle took place a week later and I saw it all. We had come up from cultivated land to higher ground cropped by sheep and halted. We had a spring-fed stream with a good head of water and the sheep kept us in fresh meat. My father waited for the Prince of Petersfield to meet him. The scouts brought news of his coming one drab gray morning with a chill east wind driving gusts of rain in our faces. Our camp was in the lee of a rounded hill topped by a clump of trees, like our own St. Catherine’s. I told Burke I wanted to go up there to watch.

  He said: “If you like, Master. I’ve seen enough fights in my time but you’re young enough to have the appetite.”

  “You don’t need to come with me.”

  He shook his head. “I’m to see you safe home, if things go wrong. And that’s not easy. The rats may lie quiet in their holes while you go through in advance, but they come out with their teeth sharpened for anyone straggling back.”

  He saw that our haversacks were well supplied with rations and our canteens filled with water. The Spirits, through Ezzard, had prophesied victory for Winchester, a greater one than last year’s, but as he said, an old soldier might believe in the Spirits but was not such a fool as to trust his life to them. If our army were scattered the baggage train would be lost and it was difficult enough escaping through hostile territory without going hungry and thirsty as well. We led our horses up the hill and tethered them in the grove of trees. The wind howled through, shaking the branches, but the rain had stopped. Then, our cloaks wrapped tightly round us, we looked down and watched the armies come together.

  It was a slow business at first. Our army, more than five hundred men on horseback, stood grouped about the blue and gold standard, near which I picked out the tall figure of my father on Guinea, his helmet topped by the royal spike. The Petersfield men came on slowly from the east, in a wedge formation with their Prince and his standard, all green, deep inside the wedge. From time to time they stopped. The taunts and jeers from both sides came up to us, thin, tiny like the figures. At one time I exclaimed as the enemy appeared to turn tail, but Burke shook his head. It was part of the ritual, he explained, and no retreat but a show of scorn, meaning they held us in such contempt that they could expose their backs.

  “If we attacked now . . .”

  “It would be to give them best in that.”

  “But we might win.”

  “We might. If you can call it a victory, achieved without honor.”

  I said: “We face the wind.”

  “It blows from their city.”

  “But if we had held the ridge on
the right—they could only have come at us across wind, and uphill also. Or would that be dishonorable, too?”

  He laughed. “Not that I have heard. But your father is a strong fighter rather than a canny one. He thinks he needs no such aid.”

  “But if they had taken the ridge . . .”

  “It would have made things harder for us. Watch! It begins, I think.”

  The two forces were riding to a clash with growing momentum. My hands were clenched and I felt the nails score my palms. The wedge advanced toward our ragged line and as it drove in I saw swords flashing even in this dull air. Our line, giving way at the center, curved round to embrace their flanks. Then it was a melee, impossible to sort out except by reference to the swaying standards, confusion to eyes and ears alike. The din, though distant, was awful: shouts and cries of men, screams of horses, rattle and clash of swords.

  The fight lasted for three quarters of an hour. Then slowly the sides disentangled as the Petersfield men fell back. The green standard bobbed away on a retreating tide.

  “Is it over?” I asked. “Have we won?”

  “We have won this fight,” Burke said. “I think there will be others. They gave way in too good order to be ready to ask for peace.”

  “If we have beaten them once we can beat them again.”

  “True enough. Except that next time they will be closer in to their own city.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “An army fights harder the nearer it is to home.”

  But they did not stand in our path again. We took East Meon and moved on, downhill at last to the low ground in which Petersfield itself stood, west of the Rother River. We camped under their walls, out of arrow shot, and waited for them either to sue for peace or come out to fight us. We were among their home farms and had food enough. They must do something or their harvest would be lost.

  Pickets were set at night, though an attack was unlikely then. Darkness favors the defenders provided they are prepared; we had stakes and ditches ready. Then one morning, as the sky was beginning to grow light in the east, I awoke to what I thought was the crash of thunder. While I was still struggling to my senses I heard another crash, and shouts of pain. I pulled on my boots and got to my feet to find the camp in confusion. There was a third crash. It was different from thunder and in any case the sky was full of high thin cloud. I looked toward the city and saw, just before the next crash, a red flare of light from the walls.