The Widow and the King (5 page)

‘You are the one who will bring that son of Wulfram down. He knows it. He tried to stop your father saying the words. And when he could not, he killed him.’

‘You told me he was killed by his enemies!’ he cried.

‘He was, my darling. Now I have told you why. And now you see why I came here to catch this Prince, and why we live here, in the very house that he built for himself three hundred years ago. Because men have made themselves kings, one after another. Yet all the time he has been the hidden King, who moves men and kings like so many pieces on a chessboard. And he brings ruin on all of us. All the fields I grew up in are wastelands now, Amba. Wastelands. And the wars and troubles that wasted them had their seeds in what he has done.

‘And if he were free, he would hunt you with every power he had, because you are the last of his father's sons.’

It was a lot to understand. She had told him before that he was descended from Wulfram, but she hadn't made it seem important and he hadn't realized that it was. He did not see how the mountain could have wept, or how the man by the pool could have lived for three hundred years, or could go on living where he was without sleep or food; waiting, and wanting to hunt him.

But what he thought about most of all, as he sat dumb and miserable on the hillside, was his father.

Ambrose had always wondered what his father had been like. He had often imagined meeting him, and finding ways to please him. Now he knew that his father had
tried to kill him. He wondered what it was he could have done that had made his father want to do that.

She put her arm round his shoulders, and he let her.

Thinking didn't seem to make it any better. It just hulked at the back of his mind, like something horrible that he couldn't see but always knew was there. The things he wanted to ask would not form themselves. They stuck in his throat as if he might poison himself by saying them.

Other questions, less important, came more easily.

‘So that man is my uncle?’

She frowned. ‘Yes, in a way. He is your uncle across nine generations. But it is dangerous to think like that, Amba. I have told you how he carries his quarrel with Wulfram's descendants. You must not approach him.’

He was silent for a moment longer. Then he asked: ‘Which angel was it?’

Now she laughed.

‘My darling – what a question! The Angels move within us, fleetingly, and do not stay to introduce themselves. My friend Martin, who was a priest, called this one the voice of Umbriel, and that will do, I suppose …’

She often spoke to him about the Angels: Umbriel and Gabriel, Michael and Raphael; whom Heaven had sent to carry its light into the world. Seven-eyed Umbriel was his favourite, because at birth he had been given the Angel's name: Ambrose Umbriel. He had not known that she had actually met any of them. But it did not surprise him very much, because he knew she had lived in the lands of the Kingdom, and had met so many people there – kings and princes and knights and bishops. Why not angels, too?

Why not – after this?

And it didn't help anyway.

‘I don't like it,’ he said.

She sighed.

‘I know, my darling. I took you up there so that you could learn what it was you were afraid of, and to help you be less afraid. And instead I've let him make me frighten you even more. And he's made us both miserable into the bargain. So it is, with him, even now. But there's nothing we can do but bear it, go on living, and maybe learn a little in spite of him. And that will be our revenge.’

Her arm tightened around his shoulders and gave him a little rock.

‘We can begin now,’ she said. ‘With breakfast. Why don't we have a little of the honey today, to cheer us both up?’

‘Yes please.’

Later, he went back to asking questions – many times, and often the same ones. She always answered, even when he did it just to distract her from being angry with him over something he had spoiled or something he hadn't done. She would finish scolding him, and then, after a few moments, she would say:

‘Your father did not know you, my darling. At the time he had never set eyes upon you. And he did not really know the mind of the man he dealt with. Men can do very evil things to people they do not know, and when they listen to the words that that man speaks.’

‘I'll get a bow and arrow,’ Ambrose said once. ‘I'll give the hillmen one of our goats for them. Then I'll go up and shoot him.’

She smiled.

‘He would be gone before your arrow had flown half the distance. Don't you remember how he appeared and disappeared? There is a place he can go where no arrow can follow him.’

‘Where?’

‘Not far: into a dream of this world, I think. Anyway,’ she added, frowning, ‘the angel did not say “kill”. I would gladly see him dead, but I do not know …’

‘Then what am I to do?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Then how am
I
supposed to know?' he shouted at her.

‘Mind your manners. I do not know
yet
. For the time being, we just go on living. That's all we need to do.’

He knew she had told him the name of the enemy; but he never had to use names much and he knew that his own was spoiled. So it did not seem fair that his enemy should have a name at all. He made no effort to remember it, and in his mind he called him ‘The Heron Man’, from the colour of his cloak and the way he had stood by the pool.

And he did as he was told, and stayed away from the ring of stones.

‘Living’ seemed to mean that his days should be filled with things she wanted him to do: fetching water from the big underground cistern; taking their half-dozen brown goats out to feed among the greener patches on the hillsides, and bringing them back up to the house again at the end of the day. Milking them, hand-feeding them, making sure they were penned into the outer yard. Cutting, carrying, and drying the goats' winter feed; cutting and carrying up firewood, carrying up and drying fish from the traps; and,
of course, Taking Care. The older he grew, and the more he would do, the more she seemed to worry about him. She kept warning him not to fish when the river was high, for fear he might be swept away. She kept warning him away from the pot, for fear that he might burn himself. Of course he tried stirring it when she wasn't looking, and, as luck had it, he
did
burn himself. He didn't think that proved anything, but she did.

And when chores were done, there would be other things, before he could play or they could have supper. There was a slate on which she showed him how to write letters, and then words. He must write any word that she said, and form the letters correctly too, if he wanted to eat well that night. She had two small books of prayers to the Angels, and she made him read them until he knew them by heart. Even when they had finished with the slate, and he had begun to play with his cup-and-ball game while they waited for the pot, she never seemed to stop wanting him to learn things.

‘You know, the hillmen say that the world is like a cup,’ she said as she watched him one evening.

‘That's because they live with mountains all round them,’ said Ambrose, who could remember their last trip to the house of the people he called Uncle Adam and Aunt Evalia at Chatterfall, in the Kingdom where the great broad sky stretched in all directions.

‘That's one reason. Now, the mariners of Velis say the world is like a ball.’

The ball bounced rebelliously out of the lips of the cup. Ambrose looked at her, crossly.

‘Who's right, then?’

She smiled.

‘Maybe they both are.’

‘They can't both be right!’

‘They can, because the world can be more than one thing. Perhaps the cup and the ball are each a dream of the other.’

‘You're being silly,’ he said.

‘You're being slow. You should be able to catch much faster than that. Let me.’

She reached for the cup, and he let her have it. With quick movements she swung the ball into the cup
clip-clipclip
three or four times, but then the ball bounced out, as it always did if it landed on the part that was a bit pointy. It tumbled free to the end of its twine.

Ambrose laughed. His mother sighed.

‘I could have done it with my old one, in my father's house at Trant. I should have made this one better.’

‘Why didn't you?’

‘Amba!’ she said reproachfully.

‘Was I ever taught to carve wood? I did my best, and no one can do you better than that. If you don't like it, play with your stones.’

‘Did you make those?’

‘No. Someone else did that.’

‘Maybe I will, then.’

‘Mind your manners, Amba, or there'll be no supper.’

He knew he would not give up the cup-and-ball, because at least the cup-and-ball
did
something, while the pebbles just sat there, or got lost by themselves when he wasn't looking. But he wanted to let her think he was thinking of it. So he picked some up from the windowsill where he kept them, and turned them over in his hands.

‘Why do the stones keep him in?’ he asked.

‘Why can't he walk between them?’

She took a pebble from his palm and held it up before his eyes. It was one of the more knobbly ones, with the same faint lines and traces on it that they all had.

‘It's stone, isn't it?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘It is, and it isn't. The hillmen say they are teeth from the mouth of the world-dragon, Capuu. Capuu is very strong. They cannot come past him – so long as the ring is left to stand.’

She watched him turning it in his fingers.

‘You have got them all still, haven't you?’

‘I think so.’

‘That's not good enough, Amba, and you know it. Find them and count them out for me, please.’

He sighed, and she looked up sharply. But there was no point complaining. She had always fussed about keeping the pebbles together – even more than she fussed about keeping him away from the pot. He gathered them in fistfuls and counted them out on the table for her.

‘Thirty,’ she said, nodding. ‘And mine makes thirty-one. Just as there are thirty-one stones by the pool. Each of these was cut from one of those stones. They have the same virtue.

‘That was how we caught him, you see. I knew that he dwelt at the pool, because it was the source of his power. And I had found out what the stones do. So I came into the mountains with gifts for the hill village on the other side of the valley. They fear him, but they also hate him. One morning I approached the pool, with forty hillmen
and their beasts. The ring was broken then, because one stone – the big one – had fallen and was out of its place. But I laid your pebbles across the gap before the enemy was aware of us. And so he and his powers were caught within the ring. Then we raised that big stone, inch by inch. It took us almost four days. Some of the hillwomen came and played with you and made you grass-dolls while a few yards away the rest of us were sweating and pulling on the levers and ropes that shut him in. And when it was done you and I went down to live in the enemy's house, and the hill folk went singing back to their village. And the enemy could do nothing.’

The hill people knew about living, Ambrose thought. They also knew how to play while they did it. Their village was perched on the opposite slope, some way along the valley. It was the only place within a day's walk where other people lived. Sometimes she took him there when she wanted things like baskets and clothes and tools, which the hill folk made much better than she could. On those days they had to leave at dawn, carrying items from the little store of trading goods that she had brought up from their visits to the Kingdom. They would walk and walk down their side of the valley to cross the stream at the bottom, and then climb up and up, following the path that wound backwards and forwards, and it was always more bends than he remembered before the little stone-built huts came into view.

Ambrose liked the village because going there was an adventure; and because of the little, bird-like hill folk too. They smiled (with very few teeth) and played music on
their pipes for him, and sometimes gave him titbits of a kind that his mother did not make. They called him
hala-li
, which she said meant ‘little king’. He supposed it was because they knew he lived in the house with the throne. He wondered if they also knew that he sometimes sat in that throne pretending to be a king addressing armies that would go out and conquer all the mountains for him.

In the summer after he was twelve, she began to let him go to make her trades on his own. He liked that, too. Bargaining was fun, using hand signs and face expressions and the very few words he knew of the language of the hills. And it meant that he could spend a whole day away from the narrow crib of his home and out in the beginning of the rest of the world. And when he was in the village he could look at the path that ran on away from it, along the hillside, up and down for days until it came at last to the Kingdom and the great lake, and to places like Chatterfall, which was the only other house he knew.

But he could never stay for long. He would have to start back in the very hottest part of the day if he was to be home before darkness. And he would walk and walk back the way he had come, until at last he would be climbing up the final stretch of path in the summer dusk. His feet and legs would be aching, and so would his shoulder if he was carrying anything heavy. The air would be cool and the mountain-colours fading.

And he would look up at the hillside above him, where the jagged ridgeline hid the pool and the stones around it.

And he would think:
He's still waiting
.

he had asked him to spell ‘justice’ on his slate and he hadn't formed the letters well.