Dark Mist Rising (39 page)

‘All right. Yes. Just as you say. Peter – Roger, I mean –

I don't like this.'

I said gently, ‘They are dead, Tom. They cannot harm you.'

‘I ain't
afraid
of them,' he said earnestly. ‘It's just that ... well, you know, they're
dead
.'

‘Yes.'

‘And we're not. You are going to take us all back, ain't you? Once we reach The Queendom?'

‘Of course I am.'

‘You're completely sure, ain't you, that you can do that?'

‘I'm sure.'
Please let it happen that way
.

‘All right.' He lapsed into troubled silence. But the next time we passed one of the Dead, another hunter although from a much later time, Tom took the bow clutched in the dead man's hand and the two arrows remaining in the quiver on his back. Tom stared at me defiantly as he stole them, but I said nothing. Weapons could harm nothing in this place except the four of us; I had learned that years ago when the Blue army had been awake beyond the grave. And I could not let Tom bring the weapons back across with us. About that too I had learned my lesson well. But I told him none of this now. Let him take what comfort he could from carrying the bow and arrow while we walked. He was much more uneasy than Jee, who possessed astonishing powers of acceptance. Or maybe it was merely that Jee had grown up near Soulvine Moor and was thus aware of the true strangeness of the world, whereas Tom had grown up in Almsbury, never thinking about it. And now he must. So let Tom Jenkins have what comfort he could find in his stolen weapons.

Another thought came to me. If I, a
hisaf
, could now slip bodily between the land of the living and the Country of the Dead, then surely other
hisafs
could do the same. All of us, including my father. If it was true that he had been imprisoned in that place called Galtryf, and if he chanced to discover this new ability, then Galtryf could hold him no longer. He might come to rescue me after all. But for my entire life my father had arrived too late to aid me. This was but one more such occasion. My bitterness towards him did not abate.

More walking, more Dead. Tom took a shield from a lone savage soldier, carrying it gingerly, as if it were a snake that might at any moment turn and bite him. But he kept the shield nonetheless.

Tom wanted to talk. He sat hunched over the fire, shifting restlessly on his great haunches until he burst out, ‘What's the good of being dead then?'

‘What?' I was trying to figure out how long the goat would last, and if I should cross back over and try for more food. Tom ate prodigiously, fuelling his great bulk.

‘I said, what's the good of being dead? If all you do is sit around for ever like some rock?'

I suddenly thought of the something bright and terrible – the sword, Alysse had called it – that had burst from the sky as I brought back the Blue army. But I did not know what it was, or what it meant for the Dead. I knew only that the memory terrified me.

‘For that matter,' Tom went on, and now his voice held anger and despair, ‘what's the good of being alive, if this is where you end up? You and me and George and everybody, just lumps sitting around in this awful place? Tell me that, Roger!'

‘Tell you what?'

‘What good is it? Death, or even life? Why bother?'

‘Tom,' I said softly, ‘have you never considered such thoughts before?'

‘Of course not! Usual people don't think about such things. They think about hunting and farming and their dinners and bedding women and ... and usual things. But then this is where it all ends up. Here!'

I had always thought about death, had always known death. But then I had always known I was not usual. I was a
hisaf
.

Tom said, ‘I wish you hadn't brought me here.'

‘But then Tarek would have killed you, and you'd have ended up here anyway.'

Tom groaned, and I saw that his distress was real, and deep: the anguish of a man who truly never thought beyond the next dinner or the next girl, and now was being forced to do so. I owed Tom my life; I must do better by him.

‘Tom, this is not all there is. Not here, I mean. And in the land of the living, there is much more. There is ...'

Maggie.

She burst into memory so vividly that it was as if she, not Tom Jenkins, sat beside me. Almost I could see her, touch her, smell the clean sweet scent of her fair curls. Maggie, who had stood by me and loved me and now carried my child. Maggie, whom – now, in this desolate place, talking of Tom's desolation – all at once I realized that I truly loved.

‘There is
what
?' Tom demanded. But I was too shaken to answer right away. So this was love. Not the dizzying longing I had felt for Cecilia, the herb-induced desire for Fia, but this powerful sense of Maggie as the woman who should be beside me, whose life was entwined with mine, whom I wanted to not only hold but also to talk to and argue with and protect and be bullied by. Maggie.

‘You have no answer,' Tom said. ‘There
ain't
no more. This is the end – sitting around like lumps, everything inside us gone. I'd rather not have been born.'

‘No,' I finally managed to get out. I must give Tom some comfort, and it must be what he wanted, not what I had just discovered that I wanted. ‘I don't think this is the end, Tom. Someone very wise once told me that the Dead are waiting.'

‘Waiting for what?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't told. But that there is more coming, eventually.'

‘Who was the wise person who said so? George?'

‘No. A witch.'

‘Well, that's another by-damn thing,' he burst out. ‘I never believed in witches before, and now here ... and all these Dead ... and you bringing us here ...' He buried his head in his hands.

I tried once again. ‘We will go home once we reach The Queendom, Tom. And you will have a long and rich life, with all kinds of girls. And when you do die someday, and come here, it will only be temporary. Like a ... a ...'

‘Like an inn on a journey?'

‘Just so.'

‘Some inn!' He snorted and looked around in disgust, which the next moment brightened into hope. ‘You mean that after this, there's another place?'

I would not lie to him. ‘I don't know.'

‘But you think so?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But it's possible?'

‘Tom, anything is possible.' Too many things.

‘Then, in that next place, there might be all the good things? Food and hunting and girls?'

I chose the safe answer. ‘I don't know.'

‘But do you think—'

‘I don't know!'

‘Well, don't
shout
.' He brooded for a long moment. ‘I think I better ask George.'

‘You do that,' I snapped, and at last he fell silent. I did not want to guide Tom Jenkins through a forest of thought that was more foreign to him than even the Country of the Dead. I wanted to sit and think of Maggie, feel the longing for Maggie that, like a slow-growing plant, had finally bloomed after years of putting forth stem, leaves, buds. Maggie, who had always been before me but whom I had never really
seen
. Maggie, my Maggie—

—whom I could not go home to, lest I lead my mad sister to my unborn son.

There must be some way around this. I had found ways around so much already. I had saved three living people by turning to the Dead. I had even transcended the usual boundaries of a
hisaf
, by crossing over bodily and not just in essence. Surely I could find some way to—

Stephanie screamed.

On that noiseless hilltop the scream shattered ears, echoed off unseen rock faces, seemed to pierce the very ground. Before I even knew I was moving, I had wrapped my arms around the little girl.

‘Your Grace! What is it? What—'

Jee grabbed her hand. ‘My lady, my lady, it was only a dream.'

Stephanie shook her head violently and the goat left her stomach and spewed down my tunic.

The vomiting actually seemed to calm her, and for a ridiculous moment I hoped she merely had indigestion. But then she choked out, ‘The ... bad girl ...'

A dream after all, and of my sister. ‘Tell me, Your Grace.'

She tried to obey, failed, tried again. In her own childish way, she was not without courage. ‘The bad ... girl ... she's very angry.'

‘At ye?' Jee said indignantly.

Stephanie shook her head. I wished she would not do that, lest more vomit come up. But it did not. ‘At ... Roger.'

‘Why?' Jee said. ‘What did the bad girl say? You can tell me, my lady.' He had not let go of her hand, her thin pale fingers tight in his stubby ones.

‘She's angry at Roger for living. She wants him dead.'

Of course she did. She would want us all dead: Jee and Tom and me. We were the three who stood between her and control of Stephanie, we three who anchored the princess in enough reality so that Stephanie was only a passive tool, not an active ally. We kept the little girl sane, as Lady Margaret and Stephanie's nana once had done. Those two women, substitutes for the princess's dead mother, had anchored Stephanie. Now they were gone, and we three males performed the same function. But for how long?

Alysse had dismissed Stephanie as unimportant. It seemed that Alysse was wrong. My sister hunted her, in dreams if not in body. Why?

I said carefully, ‘Your Grace, can you tell me exactly what the bad girl said?'

‘She said, “Die, die, my little one, die.” And she was talking to Roger. Only Roger was a baby.' Through the tears, the vomit, the fear, Stephanie's little face looked confused. As well she might. My sister's mad mind had mixed herself and our mother, herself and me, the infant who had been born in the land of the living and the one born wholly in the Country of the Dead. Finally I understood the source of my own terrible dream about my mother. It was not my own memory, but my sister's distorted images. ‘
Linked by blood
,' Alysse had said of my sister and me.

Now I knew why my sister hunted Stephanie. She wanted to use Stephanie to kill me, as she had killed Lady Margaret and the nurse. Or, more likely, Soulvine Moor wanted to use my sister to use Stephanie.

‘Stephanie,' I said, dispensing for the first time with her title, ‘this is very important. Do you know where the bad girl is?'

She nodded. ‘Far away.'

Far away. That explained why we had not been accosted in the Country of the Dead. My sister and her rogue
hisafs
must travel by walking through the landscape of the Dead, even as we must. None could subvert that, and for a brief moment I took comfort in the sheer physicality of both realms. My sister was far away.

But it was cold comfort. The princess was right beside me. And it was possible that this little girl, an unwitting conduit, could use a dream to force me to stop my own heart. Stephanie could dream me dead.

I got out, ‘Do you know the name of the place where the bad girl is now?'

Again the princess nodded. ‘Yes. Soulvine Moor.'

‘Is she coming here?'

‘I don't know.'

But I knew. Of course my sister was coming here, to claim Stephanie. And I must get my charges over the mountains as quickly as possible, so that I could return them to the land of the living before my sister or her henchmen reached us.

‘Tom,' I said, ‘douse the fire. We must go on walking.'

We did not dare let her dream. So one of us must always be awake beside her, and when her sleeping eyelids began to flutter and her thin body twitch, we shook her awake before nightmares could invade her mind. ‘Wake up, Your Grace,' I mumbled, often not sure that I myself was not trapped in a dream of endless weariness. ‘There, there, my lady,' Jee crooned. And Tom: ‘Come on now, little princess, look at Tom! Look at that pretty flower over there! Look at ... at Roger! Don't he look handsome?' Tom seemed to think that children needed constant cajoling, as if they were sheep that would not pen. I did not look handsome, and Stephanie's small pinched face squinted at Tom as if he were crazy. But she had escaped the dream.

Then more walking. More goat meat. Fewer Dead in these high remote reaches of the savage kingdom. Until we reached the mountain pass and for the first time began to descend.