Murkmere (12 page)

“And you believe that? That men don’t have the freedom to choose their fates?”

My head whirled. “I think so.”

She looked at me pityingly. “Read the rest of the book, then. It’s a history. You’ll find things were different once.” She
paused, and rubbed her neck absently. “Sometime later we took a wrong turning. I often wonder if there’s a world where things
didn’t turn out this way, where they do things differently. The Master thinks there may be lots of universes, you know, each
one only a little different from the others.”

“But where would they be, Miss?” I said, puzzled, but respectful of the Master’s great intellect. “In the sky? There wouldn’t
be enough room for them.”

“Perhaps they all fit inside each other.” Leah made circles with her hands. “I had a set of dolls when I was small. One doll
fitted inside another doll, and another inside that doll, and so on.”

“But how does the Master think the Great Eagle would fly around all these universes?” I asked faintly.

Leah laughed, and shivers ran all over me. “He doesn’t think about
that
at all, Aggie! Surely you realize he’s not a believer? The Master thinks that scientific information should dictate man’s
path, not religion.” She went on passionately, careless of the horror her words caused me, “Imagine, Aggie, perhaps there’s
another universe somewhere with a world almost exactly like ours, but without the Ministration. Without the Lord Protector.
Of course there would have to be some other system of rule in their place. But a tolerant one that allowed people to think
for themselves and be represented in government, just as we used to be.”

“Hush, Miss, that’s treason!” I looked around nervously, but we were alone in the snowy landscape: not a keeper to be seen,
not even a seagull flying through the leaden skies — for which I was glad, since seagulls are the Souls of the Drowned and
can listen. “Surely Lord Grouted, the Protector, is kind? What he does is for our good. And he married the Master’s own sister!
You must hear about him from her.”

Leah stopped and faced me, her face bleak. “Mr. Tunstall’s sister? Sophia’s dead. She caught the plague one summer in the
Capital. Some say the plague is carried in the canals of the city. She’d given Lord Grouted a son, which was all the Protector
cared about — someone to take over from him one day. I believe he’s in the Militia now, in training.” She shuddered, then
went on. “Perhaps it was for the best that Sophia died.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t remember meeting Lord Grouted, I was too small. But I’ve heard stories about him from the servants.”

“So your guardian lost his sister as well as his wife and baby?” I understood the bitterness in the Master’s face.

“He has me,” Leah said fiercely.

And, of course, there was nothing I could say to that.

“But these stories about the Lord Protector … ” I prompted after we had trudged on in silence for a while, our breath steaming
in the dank air.

Leah shrugged. “You’ll be able to judge him yourself soon enough. My guardian’s to hold a ball here at Murkmere for my sixteenth
birthday. Lord Grouted and members of the Ministration will be invited.”

“Then the Master must think he’s a good man!”

She picked up a handful of snow and threw it at an ancient oak. “You’re such a simpleton, Aggie. Can’t you understand that
Mr. Tunstall only invites them because it’s a chance to show he’s still Master here, that he can still manage his estate?
Do you think he’d allow them beyond his door otherwise? It’s been years since his quarrel with the Lord Protector, and neither’s
forgotten it.”

I gasped, and my throat stung with the cold. “He dared to quarrel with the Lord Protector? Was it about his sister?”

“Sophia was in good health then; they’d come to stay. I was too small to understand what the quarrel was about. Mr. Tunstall’s
never mentioned it to me, I only know what the servants have told me.”

She was staring ahead at the frozen mere, biting her lip. I didn’t think she’d confide more, but then she sighed and the words
came haltingly.

“My guardian was in his wheelchair, as usual, when they began arguing. After using words to no avail, he attacked Lord Grouted
with his bare hands, so the story goes. You’ve seen how strong his hands and arms are? It was after that he asked for iron
bands to be put around his chair, so that if he did lose his temper again, others would be safe.”

She gazed at me, her eyes shadowed. “You see, he’d almost strangled the Lord Protector.”

The men had cleared the ice in a broad band round the rim of the mere, and the pewter gray water lay exposed and motionless.
The black mud of the shore had been trodden clear of snow and was firm under our boots. Farther along, the way to the water
was blocked by a growth of dark rushes slicing up through the surface and a thicket of shrubs that spread right round the
mere.

“This way,” said Leah. She went down almost to the water, making the moorhens skitter away in fright.

I followed hesitantly, and suddenly she had parted the tangled bushes and disappeared.

I began to push frantically through in the direction I thought she’d taken, scratching my hands and dislodging clumps of wet
snow. The mud was soft between the bushes, and I was sinking.

“Here,” said Leah’s impatient voice, and she hauled me up
beside her, onto a causeway of small stones. “It’s the remains of an old path.”

I grasped a handful of her cloak, frightened of losing her again. Mud had splashed right up my cloak and I was thankful I’d
had the sense to wear my old one. My hat, though, was my new black felt, and I pulled it down firmly so it wouldn’t be knocked
off by the overhanging branches and twigs that spiked out at all angles; its brim was already drooping in the damp air.

“Quiet,” hissed Leah. “You’ll scare the swans.”

But I was being quiet, I thought indignantly, as quiet as you could be when squeezing through a prickly jungle of vegetation
surrounded by mud and water. I was making a heroic effort not to cry out at the creatures I thought I saw out of the corner
of my eye: eels rising and slithering over the mud, voles slipping into dark places, the scurry of rats among the reeds.

I don’t know how long we’d been struggling along when we came to a muddy beach and, at the water’s edge, a boat-house built
of planks that were rotting and green. On the far side of the beach the path was blocked by a great fall of earth that had
crumbled away from the bank to expose twisted roots and gaping holes, half full of snow.

Leah scrambled up the rickety wooden steps to the door of the boathouse, and disappeared without a word. Not wanting to be
left alone again, I climbed up after her.

In the dim green light inside she was standing on a jetty that ran around the three walls. There was a smell of soaked wood
that reminded me painfully of Aunt Jennet’s cottage
on rainy days. A single boat floated like a shadow on the scummy water below our feet.

“In the old days guests would go boating on the mere,” Leah said, her voice sounding hollow in the enclosed space. “But no
one’s cleared the weeds for years. Besides, the swans nest in the reed beds by the island. They’d attack anyone who approached
at the wrong time.”

I wished I could stay there, protected by three walls, rotten or not. But as I turned back after her into the daylight, I
heard her say, “I can see the swans!”

Next, she had pulled me impatiently down the steps, and I knew I wasn’t safe anymore.

There were swans on the marshy pools on the Wasteland, but I’d never seen them. Travelers sometimes thought them ghost birds
when they saw them drifting in the murk. Now, as I saw those pale shapes emerge from the darkness of the reed beds near the
island and skim languidly through the gray water, I understood why. Each swan glowed against the dullness of the mere, like
a candle into which the lighted wick has fallen. Their necks were slender and elegant, and they carried their heads so proudly
it seemed each one wore a crown.

Leah was counting. “They’re all safe. Those men are such monsters with their mallets and noise. When the ice is thin enough
the swans break it themselves, you know. I’ve seen them slit it with their bills and make a narrow channel to swim along.”

I watched the swans weave between each other on the water, like dancers in a dream. “There are so many!”

Leah smiled complacently, as if, like a trickster at a fair, she had produced them herself from inside her cloak. “They’re
the descendants of a pair that came from the pleasure gardens of the Capital. They were given as a wedding present to my guardian.”

So that was why she cared about them so much. She was protecting them for the Master’s sake.

“You know the language of birds, Aggie. What do swans signify?”

“But you don’t believe such things!” And I was quite sure that a copy of the
Table of Significance
wasn’t among the books in the watchtower.

“All the same, tell me.”

“True Love and Happiness in Marriage, Miss,” I said, thinking she’d laugh at me.

But her face was sad. “In that case it was an excellent present. My guardian loved his wife deeply. Did you know that a group
of swans together are called a ‘lamentation,’ Aggie? The swans still mourn for her, just as he does.”

She shot me a sly glance, her mood changing suddenly. “Do you have a sweetheart?”

The question surprised me, and I was put out to find myself blushing. I’d immediately thought of Jethro Sim, for no good reason
at all. “Swans are thought of as messengers too,” I said quickly.

“The Murkmere swans aren’t messengers,” she said, sad again. “The keepers clip their wings to keep them here.”

The swans were gliding toward our part of the shore as if
they had made the decision together. As Leah went closer to the water’s edge, they suddenly rose out of the water with a tremendous
splashing and rearing of necks and bills.

I didn’t know what to do; I was frightened they’d attack her. Now they were advancing up the beach toward her, waddling in
an ungainly way, looking enormous against her frailty. She was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of dazzling plumage.

She stood motionless, making a strange clicking sound with her tongue. The swans responded in the same way, varying their
clicks with soft snorts. Then, very gently, they began to rub their heads against her black cloak. They ruffled her fine silvery
hair and twined their necks round her gawky frame, up, down, while she ran her hands slowly over their feathers.

Her face was rapt; she’d forgotten me. For her, nothing else existed at that moment but the circling swans, and she stood
like a queen among them.

I felt a chill run through me, as if I looked on something unearthly.

I drew back, my gaze still fixed on her. The next moment I had slipped, clawing at the bank behind me, feeling a great root
give under my hand, and sending clods of wet earth and snow thudding over the hard mud of the shore.

The swans turned, and hissed furiously as they saw me, their necks rising and curving back as if they were preparing to strike.
They began to move ponderously toward me, raising their wings with a sound like wet linen flapping in the
wind. I could feel the vibration of their coming through my boots.

“Go back!” shrieked Leah. She pointed at the bushes. “They can’t follow!”

I scrambled back in, my heart beating fast, not caring whether my new hat was ripped to shreds.

Leah was making soft, soothing noises. Gradually, the hissing died away and I heard the swans start to click and snort again.
There was splashing, then silence.

“You can come out,” Leah called. “They’ve gone.”

The stretch of gray water was deserted. Leah took in my disheveled appearance without sympathy. “I should never have brought
you here. They were trying to protect me.” Her eyes were bright; her cheeks had lost their pallor.

“You look happy enough, Miss!” I blurted out resentfully.

Her face softened and was suddenly vulnerable. “I discovered the swans when I was a small child. They’ve been my companions
always, my only friends. I’ve had no one else to talk to.”

Pity tugged at me. “I know what it’s like, Miss. My sister died when I was little.”

She’d been gazing at the empty water but now she turned to me, her interest caught. “Didn’t you have friends, though?”

“None of the other girls wanted to be friends with me,” I said, with an effort. “I was the schoolmistress’s niece. I was privileged,
you see.”

She smiled at me, as if she suddenly saw me properly for
the first time. “Then we’re the same, you and I. We know what it is to be alone.”

And I was so touched that I smiled foolishly back at her.

As we turned to go I almost fell again. The globe of white root that nearly tripped me as it lay on the mud was the very same
one I’d pulled out in my fall earlier.

Leah steadied me, screeching with laughter at my disgruntled face, and then she saw the hole that the root had left behind
in the bank.

“Wait. There’s something in here.”

The hole was nearer her eye level than mine. She flung back her cloak and rolled up the sleeve of her wool dress as if to
plunge her bare white arm into the oozy darkness.

“Don’t, Miss Leah!” I cried in disgust, thinking of what might be hiding in there: water snakes, coiled slippery and cold,
and the crawling things with lidless eyes and sharp teeth that dwell in the dark.

But she didn’t listen. She felt about and brought her arm out at last, mud-smeared to the elbow; she was clutching what I
thought was the filthy, rotted carcass of some animal.

I drew back in revulsion, but instead of dropping it at once, she examined it curiously. “It’s a sack, Aggie, and there’s
something inside!”

“Leave it, Miss!”

But as I spoke, the wrapping shredded from her hand, leaving her holding a spongy bundle.

“It’s a dead bird,” I said, and clutched my amber for protection. “Lay it down so its soul can go free.”

“But there aren’t any bones,” said Leah.