The Prince in Waiting (17 page)

When we were well clear of the city we halted in the shelter of a clump of trees and I was able to get rid of my hump and both of us to dress ourselves in the more ordinary clothes we had brought in a bundle carried under my arm. We looked like farm workers now, or maybe vagrants. Before resuming our journey we ate there—a hunk of bread and cheese with an onion—and slaked our thirst at a stream nearby.

We had simple food to last us three days. It was five and twenty miles to the Sanctuary on crows' wings, probably half as far again by road and at least twice the distance by the circuitous route which we must follow to give a wide berth to any place where we might be sought. The pigeons, if they were not already flying, would soon be out with orders for us to be arrested; and we could not be sure that this applied only in Winchester's lands. The Princes of both Andover and Salisbury might be asked to trace the fugitives and might think themselves well advised to do so, as a favor to the man who had nailed Jeremy's head on his palace gate.

We tramped steadily westward, using roads or tracks but taking cover when anyone came our way and keeping well away from villages. We went in silence, speaking only on necessary matters. I was not sorry for this. It was not that I was contented with my own thoughts: in fact they followed a treadmill of anger, resentment, jealousy and despair. Certain moments and events came back again and again, and seemed each time to leave me still more numb. My father's head on the spike above the East Gate . . . the Captains giving their voice to Peter while the rain slashed against the walls of the conference tent . . . the crowd in front of the palace roaring for him . . . But I knew no conversation, with Ezzard or anyone else, would drive away those images or my feeling of black hopelessness. I suffered them better in silence.

The road to Stockbridge was over high ground but Stockbridge itself lay in the valley of the Test River. We left the road some miles from the town and went north. In the early evening we could look down and see the distant town and the river running through. I remembered we must cross it and wondered what Ezzard proposed. Even from here, a quarter of a mile away, it looked turbulent, swollen with the waters of the spring thaw. Swim it? And spend the night freezing in soaked clothes? I asked Ezzard.

“You see the high-road that runs this side of it?” I nodded. “Two miles north of here it crosses the river.”

We made our way across a field to the high-road. At this point it was not, in fact, very high, only a few feet above the level of the surrounding land. We walked beside it until it was necessary to go on it to cross the river. Dusk was heavy by now and we saw no one. The road was carried over the river by a metal bridge. Ezzard said suddenly:

“Have you ever wondered, Luke, why our ancestors built the high-roads?”

There were two near Winchester, forming an ellipse that enclosed the city. I shook my head.

“No, sire.”

“Your friend Martin has done so.”

“He has strange thoughts.” I realized that this could seem a criticism and endanger him, he being an Acolyte, and added: “I do not mean impious ones.”

Ezzard did not seem to notice it. He went on:

“Or why they are made as they are? We call them high-roads because sometimes they stand high above the fields. But in other places, as at Shawford, they run in valleys cut out of the hills. Have you ever thought of this?”

I said I had not. He stooped and pointed to where one of the thick timbers, which were still found in places on the high-roads though mostly they had been taken for winter fuel, was raised a little above the dirt.

“Or what these were for?”

Near one end the beam carried a metal socket that looked as though it in turn had supported something, a rail perhaps, running transversely across it. I said:

“I suppose they were to do with machines.”

I felt guilt in even speaking the word in the presence of the Seer, but he had asked strange questions. He said:

“And these machines—were they so much weaker than a horse that they could only travel on level ground; and therefore the high-roads had to be raised up or brought down, not taking the shape of the country through which they passed?”

I said: “I do not know, sire.”

I was embarrassed. Such speculations surely were forbidden. It might be different for the Seers, who served the Spirits, but I had no right to think them.

He did not speak again for a time. Then he said:

“You must prepare yourself for strange things at the Sanctuary, Luke.”

“Yes, sire.”

Of course there must be strange things—I knew that. Like a Seance going on all the time, perhaps: darkness with lights and bells and the sonorous voices of the Spirits. Ezzard said:

“Strange things to learn as well as to see. Your mind may be amazed by some of them.” He paused but I said nothing. “You are strong in many ways, but curiosity is not one. I do not suppose it is necessary. But it would have been better if we had had more time to prepare you.”

I did not understand what he meant but was not sufficiently interested to want to find out. I was tired and hungry, my feet sore from walking all day. I was glad when we came to one of the broken-down huts which you find here and there on the high-roads and Ezzard called a halt.

•  •  •

We slept the second night in a barn. The straw from last year's threshing made a warm bed—it had been cold in the hut with no blanket—but I slept badly. A rat ran over my arm and lying awake I heard them scuffling. I have a dread and loathing of these beasts from the time when I was a child of two or three and an old cat of ours, a hunter, brought one back and laid it on my pillow; and I awoke and in the dim glow of the night light saw its dead face close to mine. I got up and went outside. The night was almost clear, bright stars everywhere, and the fires of the Burning Lands brighter than I had ever seen them. We were nearer to them now, of course. I huddled up against the side of the barn, staring at them while I went the same dreary round of memory and anger and melancholy. In the end, despite my cramped position and the cold, I fell asleep. I was wakened by Ezzard's voice calling my name in the thin dawn light. I answered and he came to me. There was relief in his face. He said:

“I thought I had lost you, Luke.”

“I could not sleep in there.”

I would not speak of the rats, and my fear, to him. He said:

“Tonight you will sleep in a bed.”

I nodded. “I will be glad of it, sire.”

But I was not glad when, at the end of the afternoon, he pointed and I saw the Stones of the Sanctuary ahead of us. They stood like jagged teeth on the skyline; tiny but, being miles away still, having the promise of enormity. The promise or the threat. I had made this journey as a duty to my father's memory, not thinking of its end. There had been vague thoughts of the High Seers, of Seances, but nothing concrete, nothing, really, that meant anything. Those distant pillars were real, and foreboding. They were surrounded by empty downland, cropped only by rabbits. No man would go near, no shepherd graze his flocks in their shadow. It was the place of the High Seers, dread and holy, and that dread touched me, making me want to turn back toward the world of men. I would rather have taken my chance with Peter and his Captains than go forward. But I had come so far that I must go on to the end. And again I would not show my fear to Ezzard.

It was a long walk toward them. The sun, sinking, had come out from behind clouds and cast shadows from the Stones that stretched tenuous fingers in our direction. I could see them more clearly. They roughly formed a circle, great jagged-hewn wedges many times the height of a man and broad in proportion. They were set apart from each other but some were linked by other immense stones resting on top and between them.

Inside there was nothing but the rabbit-cropped grass. I felt a new and different alarm. Could this emptiness be the Sanctuary? I had expected a huge building, a castle perhaps. Where did the High Seers live? There was only grass and the great time-weathered stones. Did one walk through a doorway in one, into the Spirits' world? Or climb an invisible ladder to a stronghold in the clouds?

We crossed a shallow ditch and the stones loomed over us. We passed between two of them, scored by the wind and rain not of years, it seemed, but centuries. Within the outer ring were other stones, some standing and some fallen. Near the center, beside one of these, was a sort of mushroom, made of stone but whiter and less pitted than the bigger ones. It was only a few feet high. Ezzard went to it and put his hand underneath, feeling for something. I stood beside him, telling my limbs not to tremble. We waited in silence, for half a minute perhaps. And then the stone mushroom spoke:

“Who comes?”

The Seer bent his head toward the mushroom.

“Ezzard, with the Prince in Waiting.”

I do not know what I expected to happen: thunder and lighting, perhaps, a chariot of fire appearing out of the sky, a solid rainbow leading to a magic land. Instead there was a creaking sound and the ground on the other side of the mushroom moved, splitting and opening. There was not darkness revealed but light, a whiter, brighter light than I had ever seen, the steps leading down.

Ezzard said: “Come, Luke.”

I hesitated. They were ordinary steps but they terrified me. And the light . . . the light of the Spirits? I remembered all the events they had set in motion. Maybe they had helped me to win the jeweled sword and my father to the Princedom. But after that . . . my mother slain, my aunt executed for her murder, my father's head set up above the East Gate, a thing to be mocked. And I myself driven from the city disguised as a polymuf. The good they had done me was surely outweighed by the evil.

All this was true. What was also true was that at last I faced their stronghold. They could do no more than take my life. It was little enough worth living as it was; if I broke and ran it was worth nothing. I went in front of Ezzard into the hole.

A dozen steps below there was a platform where the staircase turned on itself before descending even farther into the bowels of the earth. Behind me Ezzard stopped and I stopped also. He touched a button set in the wall. There was a whirring sound, followed by the creaking I had heard on the surface, and I saw the gap closing above us, blotting out the sky. I realized then that underneath grass and earth there was metal and this was rising, a trapdoor to seal the opening at the top of the stairs. I was less alarmed than confused, my mind trying to take in what could not be denied and yet was impossible. The light, I saw, came from long tubes of glass. Ezzard touched another button and more of them flashed into radiance, lighting the stairs below.

“Ezzard!” I cried. “These lights . . .”

He looked at me. I could scarcely bring myself to say it, but it was not possible to be silent.

“They are not the lights of the Spirits . . . and the trap door, that is not the work of Spirits either. These are machines!”

“Yes,” he said. “I told you there would be strange things to learn.”

•  •  •

I sat at supper with Ezzard and the High Seers. They wore no cloaks but simple clothes—trousers and shirt—as Ezzard did also; and except for Ezzard their heads were not cropped but carried a normal covering of hair. On the senior of the three, who had come to Winchester, it was sparse and white with age but the big one had a heavy thatch of black. And he did not, I noticed, eat with the sparrowlike delicacy he had shown at my father's banquet but heartily, as a man who enjoys his food. Like the shaved heads and the cloaks, that had been done for show.

It was strange, too, to hear them speak in easy, unmeasured voices—to speak and even laugh. They were ordinary men, and relief and disappointment were at war in me, realizing this. I was silent, putting no questions and answering briefly the questions put to me. There were not many of these: I guessed they were letting me get used to things by degrees, accustom my mind gradually to its shock. I learned their names: the little white-haired man was called Lanark, the big dark one Murphy.

When supper was over each took his own plate to the kitchen where they were stacked in a machine that washed them: one could hear the rush of water behind the closed door. There seemed to be no servants—I supposed because there were no polymufs. One of the men operated another machine that moved across the floor with a whining sound, sucking crumbs and dust into itself. The others led the way into a large room with many chairs and couches. The walls had been painted with scenes of landscape framed by pillars—a forest glade, a garden, a view of rocks and sea, and on the fourth the streets of a city, with men and women, children, a dog scratching itself in the dust. They were reminders to men who lived like moles underground of what the world was like.

We took seats. Lanark said:

“Now, Luke, what would you like to know?”

There were so many things that it was hard to think of one. I said after a moment:

“The machines—what makes them go?”

“Electricity.”

“What is that?”

“A force. It is hard to explain. Something which is invisible but which can be used.”

“Invisible? Like the Spirits?”

He smiled. “No.”

I said, with daring: “Do the Spirits exist?”

I still half expected to be condemned for blasphemy. But Lanark said:

“If they do they have not shown themselves to us.”

“The Seances . . . the lights and sounds . . .”

“Are trickery, to keep the power of the Seers over men's minds.”

“The prophecies . . .”

“Prophecies often fulfill themselves because expectation brings its own results. Where they fail”—he shrugged—“they can usually be explained away.”

I shook my head. My mind was fuzzed with doubts and uncertainty. I said:

“I don't understand.”

Lanark said: “I know it isn't easy. Best, perhaps, to take things from the beginning. You know what is said of the Disaster?”