The Crown of Dalemark (9 page)

“We won't need a taxi; it's no distance,” Dad said. He pointed to the huge stone. “The old waystone,” he said, and set off striding into the town, “marking the start of the ancient road system of North Dalemark. King Hern, or most probably his descendants, made the roads, but simple people often thought the gods made them and tended to call them the paths of the Undying.”

Maewen pattered after him up a broad thoroughfare, listening to as much as she could hear of a series of little lectures. After the waystone, it was the traffic, then the circular road system invented by Amil the Great, then the goods sold in the expensive shops she could see on either side. Somewhere along the street, Wend caught up, carrying her suitcase, and she thought he said, “I'll explain later,” but she was too confused to be sure.

She forgot everything, anyway, when they came between giant gilded gates in a high wall and she had her first sight of the palace. It was across a cobbled court, and it was majestic. Like a very graceful cliff, she thought, almost too big to take in, and all upright lines that made it look taller still. In front of it, right in the middle of the court, there was a very much smaller building. It caught Maewen's attention for being so different from the palace that it looked quite out of place. It was like a house-sized model of a fairytale palace, with three small onion domes and such numbers of spiral towers that it looked almost absurd.

“Whatever is that?” she said.

“That? Oh, that's the tomb of Amil the Great,” her father told her, and followed this up with one of the little lectures Maewen was coming to expect. “He completed the old part of the palace two hundred years ago, quite early in his reign. That's Amil's old facade we're looking at now; those recessed arcades along the lower stories were one of his own ideas. He was always full of ideas, but toward the end of his reign the ideas got rather out of hand, I'm afraid. Amil seemed to become obsessed with death and evil. He divided his time between having this tomb built and journeying all over the kingdom to eradicate what he called pockets of Kankredin. He simply meant places where there was injustice or lawlessness, but he had become very eccentric by then, and he preferred to call them that.”

“He was very old when he died, wasn't he?” Maewen asked.

“Nearly ninety,” said Dad. “Come on inside. Give me that case, Wend. We'll go up in the lift for once.” He set off across the big space, over a pattern of cobbles and flagstones, still lecturing. “Amil had seen this country through from two primitive groups of earldoms to a full industrial society, so I think he earned the right to be a little eccentric. That tomb is by way of being his folly.”

5

Dad had an enormous, spacious apartment right at the top of the Old Palace, filled with books and old furniture. The main room looked over the leads of the roof, where pigeons waddled to the windows, expecting crusts of bread for breakfast. Maewen's bedroom looked out over the forecourt and the top of Amil's mad little tomb to what seemed miles below, with a huge view of Kernsburgh beyond that, all dark trees and towers and square office blocks. The room was enormous, with almost nothing in it but a bed, a cupboard, and a great threadbare carpet that had been old when Amil's son imported it. Next door was a large clanking bathroom with plumbing so elderly that Maewen was more awed by it than anything else in the palace.

“I'm afraid I can only spare time to be with you in the evenings and early mornings,” Dad said over supper. Supper was supplied by one of a bewildering set of young ladies, who all seemed to wait on Dad hand and foot and then turn into secretaries in between. Seeing them, Maewen instantly knew that Dad regretted the divorce no more than Mum did. He was entirely comfortable. After supper he lit a pipe and explained, “We're just moving into the height of the tourist season now. As soon as the palace opens to the public, I have to be everywhere at once. But I've told everyone that you can explore anywhere you want. Tomorrow I'll make sure they all know you, so there won't be any trouble.”

That evening they just talked, with Dad puffing clouds of pipe smoke through sunset light slanting in across the leading. Maewen found they got on. Dad seemed to think the same kind of thoughts that she did. Next morning he woke her quite surprisingly early and they had breakfast—supplied by another young lady—with rosy light slanting the other way across crusty rolls and rich black coffee. Just as Maewen was thinking how grown-up and leisurely this was, Dad sprang up and took her on a tour of the palace.

The Tannoreth Palace was vast. Buildings of various ages rayed out around courtyards with fountains, or gardens with statues and summerhouses in them, and hedges and roses, and a small menagerie. At every huge room they came to—and on some of the stairways—at every picture or work of art or curious object, Dad gave her another of his little lectures. In between he was introducing her to bewildering numbers of people who worked in the palace: ladies in overalls polishing the long museum galleries or dusting gilded tables, security men, guides, secretaries, and Major Alksen, who was head of security. Maewen's mind began to seize up. When Dad took her outside to be introduced to the gardeners, she was thinking, I shall
never
remember all this! Our minds are not the same after all. It was too early. Even though she was used to being up with the lark in the holidays to help Aunt Liss in the stables, she could see to a horse on autopilot, half asleep. This was different. No one
introduced
you to horses or expected you to know the history of the barn.

Afterward she found the only thing she could remember from the entire tour was Major Alksen because he was so much her idea of a retired soldier. And Wend, of course. She was glad Dad had not reintroduced her to Wend. Maewen felt too much pure embarrassment to go near him.

But she felt she was letting Dad down, or wasting opportunities, or something. So when Dad had given her another of his swift, awkward kisses and rushed off, Maewen felt herself bound to go all over the palace again.

It took days. Some of the time she joined in the guided tours, having made sure first that the guide was not Wend, and the guides would give her a special smile among all the crowds of foreign schoolchildren, and ordinary families, and silk-suited men and women from Nepstan, and then go on with their spiels. She visited Amil's tomb with one such crowd, but it was a cold, boring arched room inside, with a lot of gold lettering on the tombstone, and she only went there that once. She preferred indoors.

Here she usually started her sightseeing in the Old Palace, where most of the pictures were. That was easy to find because of the art students. They lay on the floor in what had been the great hall but was now a ballroom, copying the perspective in the ceiling picture. On the walls of this room Amil the Great, with his mane of fair hair and a roll of plans trailing from one hand, supervised the building of the palace. Amil was wearing purple breeches, which Maewen thought were decidedly unfortunate. They looked worse in the copies the students made of them. On the ceiling there was the whole of Dalemark spread out, from the plains and slow rivers of the South to the mountains of the North, and full of battling figures, as Amil (in the same purple breeches) led his armies against the rebellious earls at the start of his reign.

Next door to the ballroom was a smaller room where oil paintings hung in frames. This was where Maewen's favorite pictures were. She got into the habit of stepping over the students lying on the floor and then pushing between the easels and the busy students in the smaller room in order to look at the portraits they were copying. The biggest was of the Duke of Kernsburgh, posed haughtily looking over the shoulder of a trailing crimson cape, in front of a new castle on a hill.

“Amil the Great's chief minister,” Dad told her when she asked that first evening, “and one of the most ruthless men in history.”

Maewen could see the Duke was ruthless—it was in every fierce, clear line of him—but there was something familiar and almost friendly about him, too. She almost felt as if she knew him. She kept trying to decide why. He looks as if he was very nice to his friends, she decided. But if you weren't one of his friends, you had to watch it. He'd put you to death without turning a hair.

The Duke was flanked by two dismal portraits of the Adon, both much, much older, and beyond that was an even older portrait of Enblith the Fair, who was supposed to have been the most beautiful woman ever, daughter of the Undying and a famous queen. The portrait was cracked, but even so Maewen could only suppose that ideas of beauty had changed. Enblith reminded her very strongly of Aunt Liss—and no one had ever called Aunt Liss a beauty, even when she was young. I bet she
managed
people into thinking she was lovely, Maewen thought. That was all women were supposed to
be
in those days. And she pushed between easels to the portrait that truly fascinated her.

It was called
Unknown Minstrel Boy
, and she kept wishing she knew more about him. He was probably about her own age, and he had red hair—which Maewen had always secretly wished for herself—with the paleness that always goes with such hair. He was rather richly dressed in dark maroon satin, so either he was a very good minstrel or a young aristocrat posing as one. Good minstrel, Maewen decided. It was in the way his pained eyes met yours and yet looked way, way beyond, full of thoughts and knowledge and strong sadness. Someone's let him down badly, Maewen thought when she first met those eyes. She wished she knew who had and why. And kept going back to look.

She wanted so badly to know about that boy that in the end she joined the afternoon guided tour that went round the pictures. The advantage was that the students had gone home by then. The disadvantage was that this tour was always taken by Wend. It took Maewen several days to muster courage to go with it. When she did, the mere sight of Wend started her fizzing with embarrassment again. Wend saw her and gave her a polite little bow and a restrained smile. Maewen felt her face flooding with red. It was the awful way Wend never seemed to show any emotion but politeness. But she clenched her teeth and followed the other tourists.

The picture of the minstrel boy was famous for several reasons, she discovered. Nobody had ever been able to find out who the boy was, although he was important enough to have been painted by the best artist of the time. And he must have been important to Amil the Great, too, because Amil made a special bequest of the picture to his grandson, Amil II. Books had been written about the picture. Some theorists suspected the boy was Amil himself, before he won the throne. Amil the Great had also carefully preserved the cwidder that had been painted with the boy. It was obviously old, even then. The minstrel boy had his hand dreamily wrapped across the cwidder, half hiding the strange old lettering inlaid on the front. And the actual selfsame cwidder was in a glass case just beside the portrait, very fragile and cracked-looking, despite careful restoration.