The Crown of Dalemark (UK) Page 7

  “You must have wondered,” Wend said to her.

  “No, no!” Maewen said. It seemed as if she did not want to get it over after all. “No, no, I never wonder—”

  “Who that old man on the train was,” said Wend. “The one I sent away.”

  This was so entirely unexpected that Maewen said, “Oh!” Then because she could feel her face was as red as it could be, she said, “He wasn’t there. I dreamt him.”

  “No,” said Wend. “He was – well – there, even if he wasn’t what you’d call quite real. I’m afraid he’s about to become a very big threat to you unless you let me help you. Will you let me help – or at least let me explain?”

  “I – er—” Maewen was even more flustered. She was suddenly sure that Wend was mad. This was the only explanation for his grave, polite, sane look and the way it made her squirm every time she was near him. “Who was the old man?”

  “A piece of Kankredin,” said Wend. “A pocket of evil. And –” he smiled – “I promise you I am not mad.”

  This was worse than ever. “Yes, you are! You must be!” Maewen cried out, and she knew she would squirm even harder about this when she had time to think about it. “Kankredin’s just a legend from the days of King Hern – and Hern killed him, anyway, when he conquered the Heathens.”

  Wend looked his most serious, and there was a sympathy about him as if he understood precisely how she was feeling – which, if possible, made Maewen feel worse. “Yes, I know how the story goes,” he said. “People tell it like that because it’s more comforting, but it wasn’t the way of it, I assure you. Hern helped defeat Kankredin, that is true, but Kankredin couldn’t die because he was dead already. The only way he could be conquered was for someone to unbind the One himself. You’ve heard of the witch Cennoreth. She unbound the One, and Kankredin was broken and scattered into a million pieces. But he wasn’t dead. He came together over the centuries – concentrated, if you like, into larger and larger pockets – and eventually he was strong enough to take over the South and divide it from the North. Amil the Great found a way to destroy quite a bit of Kankredin, but even that didn’t really defeat him. He was just scattered, and some parts of him came forwards in time to these days. Other parts simply stayed around and arrived here and now by keeping secret and outlasting anyone who believed he was there. I’m not sure which kind of pocket you met, but I think from the way it behaved, it was one of the parts sent forwards in time.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Maewen said. “How do you know?”

  Wend shrugged. “I was there for nearly all of it. Hern was my brother.”

  Maewen stared at him. “But that’s –” She was going to say “nonsense!” but she stopped herself, because you had to be careful with mad people – “not possible, Mr Orilson. You see, that would make you so old you’d almost be one of the Undying.” And no one believes in the Undying any more, anyway, she thought, but I’d better not tell him that.

  Wend nodded. There was a sad, priggish sort of sanity to him that Maewen found deeply suspect. “I found it hard to believe too, when two of my brothers died and I didn’t even age. It is hard to admit that you are anything but mortal. But the Undying exist whether people believe in them or not. I am one. You have probably heard of me. I was known as Tanamoril for a while. Then I was called Osfameron.”

  Osfameron! The Adon’s friend who raised the Adon from the dead! He’s further round the twist than I thought a person could be! Maewen stared at Wend, all alone in the long empty museum room. Do all lunatics look this sane? I wish I knew. He’d look quite normal if he wasn’t so good-looking. Keep humouring him until he gets called away to his duties. “What do you think this piece of Kankredin wanted with me?” Maewen asked gently.

  “I think,” said Wend, “that he was trying to get control of you.”

  Maewen’s spine felt as if cold fingers were being trailed down it. She backed into the nearest glass case in order to feel safer. “Why – why would he want to do that?”

  “Because you are the image of a young woman who lived just over two hundred years ago,” Wend told her.

  “That makes no sense!” said Maewen.

  But Wend continued talking as if he had not heard her. “A very important young lady,” he said. Looking at his constrained and serious face, Maewen thought that this was the heart of his mental disorder, whatever it was. She leant on the glass cupboard and let him go on talking. “Noreth,” Wend said. “Born to rule all Dalemark. My grandfather the One was her father, and she knew from her childhood up that she was to take the crown and rule both North and South. When she had it, people would have risen to her all over the country, whatever the earls had to say.”

  “What happened? Wouldn’t she do it?” Maewen asked.

  “I don’t know what happened. She was willing enough.” Just for an instant Wend seemed to feel wretched about this. Then his face smoothed over. “I was guarding Noreth on the royal road,” he said. “The Midsummer after her eighteenth birthday, as was right, she set off from Adenmouth to ride to Kernsburgh for the crown. Nothing should have gone wrong. I was as watchful as I could be. But somewhere along the way Kankredin got to her as he was trying to get to you, and she … simply disappeared.” Wend swallowed a little. Then, with his face all cold and smooth, he said, “That was how Amil, so-called the Great, was able to claim the crown.”

  Maewen stayed pressed against the glass. “And,” she said, gently and humouringly, “you’re telling me this because I look like this lady.”

  “No,” said Wend. “I’m telling you because I’m fated to send you back in time to take Noreth’s place.”

  “Fated?” said Maewen. “That’s a strong word. You need me to agree first, and I haven’t.”

  Wend came nearer to laughing than she had ever seen him. “You forget,” he said. “I was there. So were you. So I know I did send you.” He had a funny light-hearted air to him, now that he had arrived at this point. “As I see it now,” he said, “I must have asked the One to send you to the moment on the royal road when Noreth disappeared, so that you could find out what happened and tell me when you came back here.”

  “Oh.” Maewen looked down at her two somewhat scruffy sandals planted on the glossy floor. Then I must have been – I will be – as mad as he is! Though of course, if he really was there, he is over two hundred years old, and that means he can’t be mad. It all hung together. And she knew mad people’s fantasies did often hang together. That was why they found it so difficult to get out of them. Perhaps the best way to deal with Wend was to show him it was nonsense by daring him to send her into the past. No. He could turn violent then. Best just to go. She slid carefully away along the glass cupboard and braced her sandals to run.

  Wend smiled his polite smile. “Thanks. I was needing to get at this showcase. Your father wants some of the things moved.”

  He fetched up his bunch of keys and advanced on the lock of the sliding door. He was far too near. Maewen could feel her stomach squirming and those queer pins and needles in her back that she always got when she was about to do something wrong. Strange the way Wend always made her feel like this. She slid further away, warily watching him as he undid the electronic lock and then the ordinary one. Any second now she would be far enough away to risk running for help.

  Wend reached inside the glass cupboard and gently, almost reverently, picked up a small gold statue that was standing there among vases, salt cellars, rings and other golden objects. While Wend turned to her holding the statue in both hands – she could see it was heavy – Maewen craned to see the label it had been standing on.

  FIGURE OF KING OR NOBLE (GOLD).

  PREHISTORIC. ORIGIN UNKNOWN.

  “This is the image of the One that my family once guarded,” Wend said. The radio on his belt beeped as he spoke. He frowned. “Would you take this to your father for me? Someone wants me.”

  He held the small golden image out. It was the ideal excuse for going away. Maewen reached ou
t gladly and took hold of the image in both hands. The thing was so worn and old that all you could say of it was that it had once had a face and wore a long sort of poncho robe, but the instant she touched it she had the queer doing-wrong feeling worse than before. Her teeth ached with it, and her hair tried to lift. She snatched her hands away. But by then the pins and needles were worse down her hands and legs and through her face. It seemed to affect her eyes, so that the long empty room grew foggy, and her ears, so that she could only dimly hear Wend’s beeping radio.

  THE FOGGINESS WAS cold as well as thick. Maewen lost all sense of direction. She staggered and found her sandals were getting wet in short grass beaded with fog drops. It felt icy. “Oh – ouch!” she cried out.

  Her voice had the unechoing clarity of somewhere outside – and high up too, she thought, having been brought up among mountains. Anyway it was nothing like the woody, stony echoes inside the museum gallery. She looked up and around in a panic. Everything was mist, thick white mist, except for – thank goodness! – one pink streak of dawn over to the right. And there was something dark ahead through the mist. Maewen took a couple of excruciating cold, wet strides towards the dark thing, enough to numb her feet, and found the thing was a round stone a little higher than her waist with a hole in the middle. A waystone? It was only about a tenth the size of the one outside the station in Kernsburgh, but she supposed that was what it might be.

  She stood shivering in her scanty summer shorts and shirt, staring at the stone resentfully. It’s real! she thought. Wend tricked me! I’m in shock! I’m going to die of exposure, and I haven’t the faintest idea where I am! Or when!

  Here she noticed that the pins and needles feeling was no longer with her. It had been replaced – some seconds ago, now she thought about it – by a much better feeling, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. Well, I hope so! she thought. I could scream, only there doesn’t seem to be anyone around to hear.

  She began to feel definitely warmer.

  She looked down in time to see her sandals closing over and growing up her legs into stout-looking boots. Her shorts were growing downwards into felty, rather baggy trousers that tucked into the boots. A faint jingling alerted her to the fact that her shirt was also growing, and multiplying, into linked mail with one thinnish shirt under it and another, thicker one on top. A heaviness on her head caused her hand to leap up there. She touched metal. She now had a light domed helmet on.

  She felt a mad, hilarious pleasure. I’m a warrior maid! I’m changing into a fighting girl under my own eyes – what I can see of myself! Her feet were still frozen inside the boots, and her hands were no warmer, but she nevertheless had a warm, cared-for feeling. Something – the golden statue? – was looking after her.

  There was another jingling over to the right. Maewen whirled like a wild animal. The jingling mixed with a pruff of breath, a sound that she knew very well. She moved warily over that way, jingling herself. Sure enough, looming out of the mist, dark against the pink stripe of dawn, was a horse, standing patiently waiting for someone. Not a bad horse, though rather shaggy, as far as she could see, and it was saddled and bridled, with a roll of baggage behind the saddle. It turned and blew steamy breath at Maewen as if it knew her.

  Maewen had not realised how much she had been missing horses. Almost by reflex, she gathered in the reins, put her foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. Ouch! Effort! The mail and the boots were heavy. It was only when she was up that it occurred to her that the horse almost certainly belonged to someone else. What did they do to you for horse stealing? Oh well. Say I’m awfully sorry, there was this thick fog and I thought it was mine. Would that work? It felt so much better to be mounted that she hardly cared. Deal with the owner when we meet her. She reined around towards the little waystone and tried to make out where she was.

  The mist was clearing gradually, downwards, dropping into a valley below the stone, but that was still all she could see. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

  “Oh – your pardon, lady. I never heard you come.”

  Maewen bunched herself, again with wild-animal wariness, as a tall man unfolded himself from where he had been sitting against the other side of the waystone and bowed to her, hastily and politely. When he straightened up, she saw he was Wend. She went warier than ever. His hair was a good deal longer, grown into wavy whitish ringlets that were not very well combed, which altered the shape of his face somewhat, and instead of the neat uniform she had seen him in a few minutes ago, he was wearing patched and baggy woollens with an old sheepskin jacket on top. The sort of clothes, Maewen thought, that a poor shepherd might have worn two hundred years ago. She stared at Wend, wondering if she really was in the past. And does he know me? Does he think I’m Whatshername?

  Wend stared back with the usual grave politeness. “I am Wend, lady,” he said. “If you remember, we met before.” So he does know me, Maewen thought. “And I am here to follow you from waystone to waystone along the royal road, until you come to Hern’s city of gold and claim your rightful crown.”

  He’s briefing me, Maewen thought, and so he should – tricking me into pretending to be this Northeen, or whatever she’s called! The trouble was Wend still made her fizz with embarrassment. He spoke in a very strong Northern accent, of the kind that Mum and Aunt Liss always objected to when Maewen spoke that way. It seemed quite natural to Wend, but she had heard him speak quite normally only a minute ago, and she could not get over the feeling he was putting on an act. It irritated her. “I think I need to know a bit more than that,” she said angrily.

  Wend bowed humbly, which irritated Maewen even more. “True, lady. Then I will tell you what no one else knows. I am the one they call the Wanderer, and I keep the green roads—”

  He stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. There was a brisk jingling of tack below and nearby. Maewen once more bunched up like a wary wild animal and watched two more riders scramble uphill out of the fog. They seemed to bring the fog with them, fog of their own breath, fog of their horses’ breath, and fill the air with their presence.

  “Good morning, Noreth,” said the smaller of the two. “You got ahead of us very quickly. We were hoping to ride up with you.” He was riding a truly magnificent mare. His clothes were like the ones Maewen had so recently acquired, mail coat and cap and all, except that on this man they had a neater, wealthier look. Maewen was shocked to find that she knew his face. She had last seen those clear-cut ruthless features staring over a painted shoulder out of the portrait of the Duke of Kernsburgh.

  It gave her a vivid, physical shock, like touching a live wire. Up to then Maewen had not really believed she had been sent two hundred years into the past. But here was a live man, breathing out warm, live, foggy breath, whom she knew to have been dead for well over a century. It made it real. It made it much more frightening. She looked rather frantically across at the taller rider, wondering if she would know him too. He was young and gawky and obviously in the middle of growing even taller. His clothes, which were quite neat too, sat on him as if they were his best clothes and he was used to wearing something much scruffier. And his horse looked villainous.

  He was a total stranger, but Maewen’s feelings about that changed from relief to dismay when this young one smiled at her. He smiled in a cheerful, friendly way, with just a touch of shyness, as if he knew her quite well. And she had simply no idea who he was. Oh great One! she thought. Why hasn’t Wend warned me about these people?

  She looked at Wend, waiting humbly by the waystone, but had to look back when the man with clear-cut features spoke again. “As you see,” he said, “Mitt and I have come to be your followers on the royal road.”

  Maewen was thrown into confusion again. He sounded so sarcastic. It was just the way a man like this one would speak – and it made her feel about five years old. But it was a double confusion. She suddenly found she had no idea when this was. She had been assuming, in a muddled and buried way, that she had bee
n bounced into this Noreth-woman’s place somewhere halfway to Kernsburgh. But from what this man said, she could be right at the start of Noreth’s journey from the North. It gave her a low, grinding sort of worry to add to all the other things. Among the other things was the thought, If Kankredin got to Noreth that early, how soon will he get to me? And a slightly more trivial thought, but just as worrying, was that this man on the fine mare was not going to be made Duke of Kernsburgh until some years on in Amil the Great’s reign. If she was Noreth and at the start of Noreth’s journey, then Amil the Great was somewhere else in Dalemark and nowhere near being King yet. So this man was not Duke of Kernsburgh yet. And she had no idea what to call him. At least she now knew the younger one was called Mitt.

  She gave Mitt a flustered smile and tried a stately bow on his companion. He bowed back, ironically, and raised an eyebrow at Wend. He was, naturally, one of those who could slide one eyebrow up without the other one moving at all.

  “I am Wend, sir,” Wend said humbly, “and I follow the lady too.”

  “Well, well. That makes three of us,” the man said. “How many more are we expecting?”

  Maewen could not answer since she probably had less idea than he did. In fact, she had no idea what they expected her to do. She simply sat on her purloined horse and hoped that Wend would have the decency to give her a hint.

  Wend said nothing. They all sat, or stood, while the horses fidgeted and the pink of the sky spread and faded towards a grey morning. Below, the mist seemed to be thinning, but not enough to show any landscape that might give Maewen some idea whereabouts they were. She began to feel stupid. This had the feeling of a party when none of the guests turn up.

  The man who would be Duke of Kernsburgh obviously felt the same. “Not much sign of a mighty band of followers,” he remarked.

  Mitt was horribly embarrassed. “Navis!” he protested.

  Navis! Maewen thought in the greatest relief. Or should I call him Your Grace? No. Stupid. Not yet.