The Perilous Gard (19 page)

"Oh yes," said Joan. "They carry the gold bowls out of the room with the beautiful warm blue water, and then they carry them back again. I have a gold bowl, and you have a gold bowl, and Betty has a — "

"No, no, not those," Kate interrupted her. She knew all the bowls that were carried into that room: the four for the mortal women, the twenty-seven for the Lady and the Fairy Folk, and the one bronze bowl for the creature in the Well.

"Gold for the maids, and wood for the masters," said Joan dreamily, "and one bronze bowl for the King of the land, at his death-time."

"Who told you that?"

"I don't know," said Joan, yawning. "But isn't it a beautiful saying? Beautiful, beautiful, beauti — "

"There's no King of the land now," said Kate. "That bowl is for someone else."

"Then isn't the saying true?"

"It can't be."

Nevertheless, when she did the washing that "day," she rinsed out the bronze bowl slowly, turning it in her hands and looking at it carefully for the first time. It had certainly been used to hold the boiled grain and milk and honey that was reserved for the People of the Hill. Neither was it made of gold, like the mortal prisoners' dishes; nor was it ornamented with animal heads, but only with an intricate embossed design of bird shapes falling and rising in and out of a circle of flames. "It can't be," she repeated to herself. "It can't — " Then suddenly the answer came to her. Joan had been right. Contempt for ordinary human comfort and delight was drilled into the People of the Hill from the time they were children, old enough to stand in the great cavern and watch the mortal women making pigs of themselves out of riches and art. All their kind, even the Lady, ate from plain wood. No member of that community, however strange, could possible count it a privilege to have his food served to him in a splendidly ornamented bowl of metal, any more than if it had been a swill pail or a chamber pot. A bowl like that would be given only to a mortal prisoner. A mortal prisoner — Kate set the bronze bowl in its place on the table and went to fill her basin at the fountain — but not a common mortal prisoner, one of the servants and scrubbers? This one was fed on what the Fairy Folk surely regarded as worthier food; and the bowl was finer too, less precious and not so heavily or scornfully decorated. Gwenhyfara always went to fetch it herself, as she did the Lady's own dish, and put it down carefully separate from the others: below the wooden ones, to be sure, but well above all four of the gold. Evidently, then, the mortal prisoner was someone of dignity, set apart from the rest, almost as if — in Joan's words — he were the King of the land at his death-time. She could think of only one mortal prisoner that the People of the Hill might treat like that, only one. And that one could not be very far away. It never took Gwenhyfara more than a few moments to go and bring back the bowl through the door at the short end of the food place.

The trouble was that once she was out of the room, there was no telling in what direction she went — left to the great cavern, or right to the dark narrow opening in the wall and the two closed doors further down the passage.

Kate did not dare to follow her when she went out the next morning. The most she could do was fall back on the trick of counting to see exactly how long she was away. It was no longer than it took Kate to reach thirty: say, roughly, fifteen counts to get to her destination and fifteen to come back again.

Later, when the day's work was over and the scrubbers were returning to their stable, Kate made another count, this time in the passage.

That settled it. The nearest of the two closed doors was forty-one counts down the passage from the food place, even without doubling the number to allow for the return. Fifteen would carry Gwenhyfara only as far as the dark narrow opening in one direction, or else the great cavern in the other. And she could not have gone to the cavern, not possibly. Kate herself would have seen anybody who was kept there. It was the dark narrow opening, then. There was nothing else left for it to be.

Fortunately, Gwenhyfara never lingered in the stable after she had seen Joan and Betty and Marian and Kate safe in their velvet stalls. Kate watched the flaming points of her candlebranch dwindle to sparks and vanish as they moved off down the passage; then, with a sigh of relief, she slipped back into her fur-lined robe and crept from the room, feeling her way along the wall in the darkness.

She was by now so familiar with the path to the cavern that she was not afraid of getting lost; the chief danger was that she might encounter one of the Fairy Folk or be taken by a sudden attack of the weight. But for once the luck seemed to be with her. The weight held off and nobody appeared to question or send her back, not even when she stumbled over a step that she could not see and loosed a shower of echoes from the hollow rock all around her. She crept by the two closed doors and then moved across to the opposite wall, groping for the narrow opening on the left.

The narrow opening was, as she had thought, the entrance to another passage. After three or four steps, it turned sharply to the left again; and she was just feeling her way cautiously around the corner when she heard a sound that brought her up short, frozen to the wall. Somewhere in the darkness ahead of her a voice was speaking.

The voice was very low, and so stumbling and broken that it was unrecognizable. It was an instant before she even caught the words and realized that it was not speaking to her.

"Help me," it said in an agonized whisper. "Help me. O my dear Lord Christ, make me able to bear it."

Then it died away, and there was a complete silence.

Kate flattened herself against the rock, hardly daring to breathe. She felt as if she had broken unforgivably into somebody's private room and did not know how to get out again. Her first thought was simply to keep him from finding out that she was there at all. She did not want him even to wonder if by some chance she might have overheard him.

It was not until the silence had gone on for a long while that she finally took a step forward, bringing her foot down hard and dragging the hem of her robe rustlingly along the wall to warn him.

Christopher said, steadily now but more grimly than she had ever heard him speak:

"Have you come back again? This isn't your time."

"Christopher?" said Kate, wondering who he thought she was. "It's Kate, Christopher. Where are you?"

"Kate?"

"Kate Sutton."

There was a cry from the darkness.

"No!" said Christopher — and then, like a man driven beyond all endurance: "Oh, good Lord! What are you doing here?"

Chapter X

"Neither Sun nor Moon"

Kate stood still. She had sometimes, lying in her bed or washing down the floor of the cavern, comforted herself with the thought of this meeting; but on those occasions, the first words Christopher spoke had always been entirely different. "Master John caught me at the Holy Well, and the Lady brought me here to be one of the scrubbers," she informed him, in her stiffest manner. "I couldn't find out where they were keeping you until now. And I do think," she added, "that you might at the least say you were happy to see me."

"Happy!" retorted Christopher. "What would you do if you met your best friend in hell? Say you were happy to know he was there too, and isn't the pitch hot? Stop nattering and come here to me. I can't get any nearer to you because of the mesh."

"What mesh?" Kate demanded, groping her way forward. The next instant she was brought to a halt as if by a solid wall.

A row of thick wooden stakes had been set across the whole width of the passage, blocking it from floor to roof. The stakes were sunk in the rock, and the spaces between them were filled with a closely woven net of tough bark strips or withy, interlaced like basket work. Kate ran a dismayed hand along the intricate knots that lashed the mesh to the bars. "Isn't there any way through?" she asked.

"There must be a door in it somewhere, but I've never found it," said Christopher. "And a sort of little window to the left where they give me my food. I don't know if you can open it."

Kate tried, but there seemed to be no bolt or latch or handle anywhere and the window had been so cunningly fitted that she could not even feel the joins in the stakes and the basket work.

"One of their tricks," said Christopher briefly. "No matter. We can talk well enough as it is. Stay low to the floor and keep your voice down."

"Are they likely to hear us?"

"Not very likely. There's never anyone moving about this hour of the night — by 'night' meaning the time when they're quiet and I don't see lights going back and forth in the outer passage so I call it 'night' in a manner of speaking, but heaven alone can tell what it really is. This place is worse than the one in the ballad, where they had neither sun nor moon and had to go by the roaring of the sea."

"I know," said Kate, settling herself on the stone of the floor as close to the mesh as she could. She heard Christopher move in the darkness on the other side, and then felt the mesh stir a little at her shoulder as if he had leaned his own shoulder against it.

"Where are you?" he whispered.

"Here," said Kate.

"Good. Now! Tell me. What's been happening? Where's Cecily? Have you seen her? Did they send her to Geoffrey?"

"No, but she's safe at the Hall. They're planning to give her to Sir Geoffrey with some tale or other when he comes back after All Saints' Day. But never mind that. I'll tell you later, after we're out of here. This door in the mesh, Christopher. Couldn't you break it down if you tried?"

"Now who's talking as though I were King Arthur in a romance?"

"But couldn't you?" Kate insisted, remembering the grip of the hands that had dragged her away from the Holy Well. "This thing is only made of wood, not iron or steel; and as soon as I find out how the passages are marked so that we won't get lost, couldn't you — "

"No," said Christopher flatly. "Stop it, Kate. They'd only take Cecily again if I did."

"They won't be able to, once Sir Geoffrey comes back."

"Everything will be over and done with long before Geoffrey comes back."

"No, it won't. Christopher, listen. You don't understand. There's something else. I saw Randal."

She heard him catch his breath.

"Ah!" he said very softly; and then: "Did you? How? I thought you said Master John and the Lady had you."

Kate told him about the window in Master John's evidence room.

" — and I'm still not certain that Randal knows just what I meant by All Hallows' Eve," she ended apologetically. "But it can't have done any harm. Sir Geoffrey's sure to come as soon as he has the letter. I thought it was safer to gamble on it than to argue with him."

"Don't fash yourself over that," said Christopher. "What else can you call this whole business but a gamble from start to finish? I seem to have been playing pretty freely with your money too, haven't I? O Lord, I wish I'd never dragged you into this coil, Kate! I'm sorry."

"Why should you be? You tried hard enough to keep me out of it," said Kate tartly. "You and your conscience! One of these days you're going to start trying to carry the whole world on your own back, and then God won't have any more work to do."

"One of these days your husband is going to beat you," said Christopher between his teeth. "And if I could only get out of this foul hole, how gladly I would save that poor unfortunate man the trouble!"

"Is it really a foul hole?" asked Kate anxiously.

"No, except in a manner of speaking. There's a bed and another little room at the back for washing and a rush mat on the floor that I'm sitting on now, and once a day — if 'day' you can call it — a pretty girl brings me my porridge and leaves a light out there in the passage for as long as it takes me to eat and clean myself up."

"Gwenhyfara," said Kate.

"Is that her name? I didn't know. She's never said a word to me because I'm dead."

"What?"

"Dead."

"Oh, don't be so silly, Christopher! You're not dead."

"Thank you: I was beginning to wonder myself. I only wish the People of the Hill agreed with you."

"What do you mean?"

"Didn't the Lady tell you? In the old days, once they chose a man to pay the teind, they shut him in here for the last nine weeks before All Hallows' Eve to be trained and prepared, so that when the time came he would go freely — even willingly — without trying to hold any part of himself back. The 'death service' was what they called it long ago, when the King of the land did it. To their way of thinking, he was dead from the moment he entered this place, or at least couldn't be treated as if he were even in the world any longer. Everyone was strictly forbidden to touch him, and nobody was allowed to speak to him except the Guardian of the Well."

"Is that another name for the Lady?"

"No. The Guardian is the one you saw at the Well that night, the one who took me. When I came to my senses, I was lying on my bed in this place, and he was over somewhere beyond the mesh — like you, only on the other side of the passage — and whispering to me in the dark. He was telling me about the old days, and what it was that had to be done to a teind-payer while he was practising death. He comes back on some of the nights, as soon as that girl takes the light away, and sits over there in the dark again."

"But what for? What is it that he does to you?"

"Nothing much." She knew from the tone of his voice that he was not going to tell her anything else. "What it is that has to be done to a teind-payer. But that's why they've never liked to use a child to pay the teind — no child can go through with a nine weeks' death service, and so the power gets lost or wasted. The Fairy Folk think — "

"I don't care what the Fairy Folk think!" Kate broke in on him indignantly. "I think it's abominable! Just as if you were a goose in a cage being fattened for a dinner!"

Christopher gave a sudden gasp and then burst out into helpless laughter. He laughed and laughed, and went on laughing wildly.