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Maewen grinned. That, coming from Mum, was rich. But it seemed to have been the main reason for the divorce. Dad just kept forgetting he had a wife and daughter. She felt that if Dad turned out to be a male version of Mum, she could cope. She was used to it. It was worth it for the chance of living in the royal palace of Amil the Great in the middle of the capital city. But what if Dad turned out unpleasant? Maewen had always found it hard to believe that you could divorce someone just for being vague. After all, she had never felt the slightest desire herself to divorce Mum. That made her grin again.
By the time the train slowed and rolled creaking into Kernsburgh Central Station, Maewen was feeling quite cheerful and poised. But that was in her mind. Her body persisted in thinking it was very nervous, and her arms felt like string as she tried to heave her suitcase off the train. It was blocking the door, and she could sense the crowd of passengers behind getting more and more irritated. But just as she was getting truly flustered, here was the polite, attentive guard again, giving her a serious smile and picking up her case for her.
“Let me carry that.”
He set off into the station, and she pattered after him, grateful even though he was looking after her like a baby. The station was much larger than she had expected, high and ringing with announcements and people’s voices and feet, and full of big red pillars that made all the parts of it look the same.
“My father is meeting me,” she began defensively.
She saw Dad as she said it, coming through hordes of people going the other way. He was reading from a bundle of notes in his hand, and it was clear that the other people pushing past just did not exist for him. The sight took Maewen instantly back seven years. It was a pure delight the way Dad stood out from everyone else by being so trim and clear-cut – but not for being tall, she realised as Dad came close. He only came up to the guard’s shoulder. So that’s where I get my smallness from! she thought, and for one mad moment she wondered if Mum had divorced Dad because Mum herself was so tall and willowy.
Dad looked up from his notes and recognised her as if he had only seen her yesterday. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You don’t look a bit like this photo.” He turned the bundle of notes round to show her the snapshot clipped to the front. It was one Maewen had never liked, herself all long-faced and freckled with her arm over a horse, not unlike the horse, and the horse the better-looking of the two. “I suppose that’s how your aunt Liss likes to see you,” Dad remarked. “She sent the photo, of course.”
There was a slight awkwardness then as Dad bent a bit and kissed her cheek and did not quite give Maewen time to kiss him back. He smelt just the same as she remembered, with pipe smoke somewhere. He wheeled away almost at once to stare at the guard. “You needn’t have bothered, Wend,” he said. “I can be trusted to remember to meet my own daughter, I hope.” He had put back his head and gone all haughty. Maewen remembered that haughtiness well. Was it the haughtiness that had caused the divorce really?
“I was supposed to take care of her, sir,” said the guard. “Or so I thought.”
Maewen turned to stare at him. She had thought the uniform he was wearing was a railway one, but now she saw it was a paler blue and that the cap was wrong. How puzzling.
“I take it you two have met,” Dad said. He was still haughty. He went on with the utmost sarcasm, “Maewen, my chief assistant, Wend Orilson. Wend, my daughter, Mayelbridwen Singer.” Then he swung round and strode rapidly towards the way out, leaving Maewen to dither, not knowing whether to run after him or stay with the puzzling Wend and her suitcase.
She arrived at the exit doing neither, partly chasing Dad and then stopping and turning to look at Wend, wondering if she had the nerve to ask him if Dad had really sent him all the way to Adenmouth to collect her, and then forgotten – and then not daring and running after Dad again. They arrived outside in single file, into a roar of traffic and much hotter sun than Maewen was used to. There was a vast stone, round, with a hole in the middle, upended in the traffic island in front of the station. Its huge shadow fell across the front half of the queue for taxis.
“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 storeys were one of his own ideas. He was always full of ideas, but towards 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 fully industrial society, so I think he earned the right to be a little eccentric. That tomb is by way of being his folly.”
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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 round courtyards with fountains, or gardens with statues and summer houses 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.
Afterwards 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 spiel. 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 favourite 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.
“Well, fancy that!” said everyone, raising cameras and jostling for the best shot of it.
After that Wend took the party into the ballroom, where he told them that the paintings on the wall and the ceiling had been done in the time of Amil II. Nobody knew what Amil the Great really looked like, and the purple trousers were a pure invention. This so amused Maewen that she left Wend’s embarrassing presence in order to go down to the hallway and buy a postcard of Amil in his breeches and write a “Wish you were here” message on it to Mum and Aunt Liss. Then she made a foray into Kernsburgh itself to post it.
The city was even more crowded than the palace, and the traffic was terrible. A very few glances into the shops as she passed showed Maewen that she had barely enough money even for ordinary presents for Mum and Aunt Liss. Kernsburgh sold things from all over the world, and it was expensive. But the distressing thing to someone who had been brought up in the country like Maewen was that the place seemed to have almost no trees once you were down on street level.
“Where do all the trees go?” she asked Dad that evening.
It was a perfect example of the way she and Dad got on. Dad knew just what she was talking about although he was busy laying out sheets of stiff paper and notebooks on the other end of the table. “In people’s gardens, I think,” he said. “I believe Amil the Great planned it that way, because there were no trees on the site when he started to rebuild Kernsburgh.”
“Then he made a mistake,” Maewen said. “It’s all buildings and cars, and it makes me cough.”
“You’d have coughed worse when the place was new,” Dad said. “Two hundred years ago it would have been smog from coal fires. Though I’m never sure it was such a good thing when they discovered oil under the Marshes. It makes the Queen a rich woman, I suppose, but it has its drawbacks.”
“Where is the Queen?” Maewen asked. “I’ve been almost all over the palace now, and—”
“Oh, she very rarely comes here these days,” Dad said. “She’s pretty old, you know, and she prefers the warmth in the South. She almost only ever comes to the Tannoreth for state occasions.”
“And the Crown Prince?” Maewen asked, feeling rather let down.
“He lives in Hannart,” Dad answered absently, busy with a notebook. “Doesn’t get on with his mother or with public events.”
“What are you doing?” Maewen asked him.
“Trying to establish our family tree,” said her father. “It’s a hobby of mine – and damned exasperating too. You can come and look if you like.”
Maewen came and leant on his square, warm shoulder, and he spread scrawled books and careful diagrams out for her to see. “Here,” he said. “My family. As far as I can tell we go back to one of the travelling Singers. I think his name may have been Clennen, but Singers wandered about so and were so little documented that it’s a fiendish job to find out for sure. Compared with that period, the last hundred years were a doddle, and I thought those were bad enough. And when we get to your mother’s family, things get even worse. Here.” Dad pushed sheets of paper in front of Maewen, hectically scrawled all over in pale pencil. “See? There’s some connection with Amil II’s brother Edril, but that’s as far as—”
“You mean Mum descends from Amil the Great!” Maewen exclaimed.
“So do a lot of people. If you mean that accounts for your mother’s standoffish vagueness,” Dad said drily, “I hardly think so. If you remember that everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, you can see that almost everyone has to be related if you go back far enough. We’re talking here about doubling the number of ancestors each person has every generation, and halving – or even quartering – the number of people those ancestors could have come from. The population of Dalemark was quite small until a hundred years ago.”
He was lecturing again. Maewen tried to listen. She was quite interested in the difficulties Dad had had sorting out the two generations around the time of Amil the Great. School history didn’t tell you half the confusions and revolutions there had been then. But there was so much of it. It had been dark for hours and she was yawning before Dad said, “Well, that will have to do for now. I’ve another long day tomorrow.”
Once she was in bed, Maewen tried to sort out how she felt about Dad and the divorce. She was very fond of Dad – achingly, fiercely fond – but not so much when he lectured. And try as she might, she could not be upset that he was quite happy to be divorced from Mum. She had expected to feel sad – she felt she ought to feel sad – but whenever she passed the big busy office on the floor below and saw Dad conferring with secretaries, snapping instructions at Wend, or consulting with Major Alksen – and sometimes all three at once – she was glad she did not have to live with him and Mum at once. These were two strong-minded people who were both utterly buried in their work. And one of those, Maewen felt, was enough at one time.
Next morning, as she chucked pieces of bread on to the leads for the fat waddling pigeons, Maewen discovered that sorting that out about Dad had somehow let her off having to remember everything about the palace. As it was another baking hot day, Maewen decided to go for a swim. Major Alksen had said she could use the staff bathing pool. But he had not said where it was. She set out to find him and ask him.
Downstairs she went to the office. It was so busy that though she could hear Dad’s voice, she could not see him among all the other hurrying people. And the secretary nearest the door said that Major Alksen had already gone down to his security post. Maewen went down again to the great upper galleries of the palace, which were cool and quiet and empty yet, until the palace opened to the public. These long rooms were a sort of museum, where curios and clothes belonging to past kings and queens sat in cases among statues and pieces of carving that had once been on the outside of the palace. As a lot of the things were very valuable, Major Alksen was often there, patrolling with a radio phone, checking security. As she came into the first room, Maewen could hear his footsteps ringing in the distance somewhere and his voice talking into his radio. “Coming through Gallery Two now. All secure. Over.” She made towards the sound.
The person she saw when she went round the corner was Wend. Maewen stopped. How had he sounded so exactly like Major Alksen? Luckily Wend’s handsome face was set intently on distance as he listened to the voice on his radio. He had not seen her. Full of embarrassment again, Maewen started to tiptoe softly round the corner.
“Don’t go, Maewen,” said Wend. “I’ll be with you in a moment. Right. Everything in place here. Over and out.”
What excuse could she possibly give for rushing away? Maewen wondered. So sorry, I need to swim this second. Forgive me, but I have to go and depress myself at once by seeing Amil’s tomb. Excuse me, I must go and look at the Duke of Kernsburgh – urgently. Or she could just run away. But Wend was already turning towards her, and the only thing she could think of was to let him explain why he had been sent to meet her as if she were ten years old and get it over with.
“You must have wondered,” Wend said to her.
“No, no!” Maewen said. It seemed as if she did not want to get it over after all. “No, no, I never wonder—”
“Who that old man on the train was,” said Wend. “The one I sent away.”
This was so entirely unexpected that Maewen said, “Oh!” Then because she could feel her face was as red as it could be, she said, “He wasn’t there. I dreamt him.”
“No,” said Wend. “He was – well – there, even if he wasn’t what you’d call quite real. I’m afraid he’s about to become a very big threat to you unless you let me help you. Will you let me help – or at least let me explain?”
“I – er—” Maewen was even more flustered. She was suddenly sure that Wend was mad. This was the only explanation for his grave, polite, sane look and the way it made her squirm every time she was near him. “Who was the old man?”
“A piece of Kankredin,” said Wend. “A pocket of evil. And –” he smiled – “I promise you I am not mad.”
This was worse than ever. “Yes, you are! You must be!” Maewen cried out, and she knew she would squirm even harder about this when she had time to think about it. “Kankredin’s just a legend from the days of King Hern – and Hern killed him, anyway, when he conquered the Heathens.”
Wend looked his most serious, and there was a sympathy about him as if he understood precisely how she was feeling – which, if possible, made Maewen feel worse. “Yes, I know how the story goes,” he said. “People tell it like that because it’s more comforting, but it wasn’t the way of it, I assure you. Hern helped defeat Kankredin, that is true, but Kankredin couldn’t die because he was dead already. The only way he could be conquered was for someone to unbind the One himself. You’ve heard of the witch Cennoreth. She unbound the One, and Kankredin was broken and scattered into a million pieces. But he wasn’t dead. He came together over the centuries – concentrated, if you like, into larger and larger pockets – and eventually he was strong enough to take over the South and divide it from the North. Amil the Great found a way to destroy quite a bit of Kankredin, but even that didn’t really defeat him. He was just scattered, and some parts of him came forwards in time to these days. Other parts simply stayed around and arrived here and now by keeping secret and outlasting anyone who believed he was there. I’m not sure which kind of pocket you met, but I think from the way it behaved, it was one of the parts sent forwards in time.”
“I don’t believe you,” Maewen said. “How do you know?”
Wend shrugged. “I was there for nearly all of it. Hern was my brother.”
Maewen stared at him. “But that’s –” She was going to say “nonsense!” but she stopped herself, because you had to be careful with mad people – “not possible, Mr Orilson. You see, that would make you so old you’d almost be one of the Undying.” And no one believes in the Undying any more, anyway, she thought, but I’d better not tell him that.
Wend nodded. There was a sad, priggish sort of sanity to him that Maewen found deeply suspect. “I found it hard to believe too, when two of my brothers died and I didn’t even age. It is hard to admit that you are anything but mortal. But the Undying exist whether people believe in them or not. I am one. You have probably heard of me. I was known as Tanamoril for a while. Then I was called Osfameron.”
Osfameron! The Adon’s friend who raised the Adon from the dead! He’s further round the twist than I thought a person could be! Maewen stared at Wend, all alone in the long empty museum room. Do all lunatics look this sane? I wish I knew. He’d look quite normal if he wasn’t so good-looking. Keep humouring him until he gets called away to his duties. “What do you think this piece of Kankredin wanted with me?” Maewen asked gently.
“I think,” said Wend, “that he was trying to get control of you.”
Maewen’s spine felt as if cold fingers were being trailed down it. She backed into the nearest glass case in order to feel safer. “Why – why would he want to do that?”
“Because you are the image of a young woman who lived just over two hundred years ago,” Wend told her.
“That makes no sense!” said Maewen.
But Wend continued talking as if he had not heard her. “A very important young lady,” he said. Looking at his constrained and serious face, Maewen thought that this was the heart of his mental disorder, whatever it was. She leant on the glass cupboard and let him go on talking. “Noreth,” Wend said. “Born to rule all Dalemark. My grandfather the One was her father, and she knew from her childhood up that she was to take the crown and rule both North and South. When she had it, people would have risen to her all over the country, whatever the earls had to say.”
“What happened? Wouldn’t she do it?” Maewen asked.
“I don’t know what happened. She was willing enough.” Just for an instant Wend seemed to feel wretched about this. Then his face smoothed over. “I was guarding Noreth on the royal road,” he said. “The Midsummer after her eighteenth birthday, as was right, she set off from Adenmouth to ride to Kernsburgh for the crown. Nothing should have gone wrong. I was as watchful as I could be. But somewhere along the way Kankredin got to her as he was trying to get to you, and she … simply disappeared.” Wend swallowed a little. Then, with his face all cold and smooth, he said, “That was how Amil, so-called the Great, was able to claim the crown.”
Maewen stayed pressed against the glass. “And,” she said, gently and humouringly, “you’re telling me this because I look like this lady.”
“No,” said Wend. “I’m telling you because I’m fated to send you back in time to take Noreth’s place.”
“Fated?” said Maewen. “That’s a strong word. You need me to agree first, and I haven’t.”
Wend came nearer to laughing than she had ever seen him. “You forget,” he said. “I was there. So were you. So I know I did send you.” He had a funny light-hearted air to him, now that he had arrived at this point. “As I see it now,” he said, “I must have asked the One to send you to the moment on the royal road when Noreth disappeared, so that you could find out what happened and tell me when you came back here.”
“Oh.” Maewen looked down at her two somewhat scruffy sandals planted on the glossy floor. Then I must have been – I will be – as mad as he is! Though of course, if he really was there, he is over two hundred years old, and that means he can’t be mad. It all hung together. And she knew mad people’s fantasies did often hang together. That was why they found it so difficult to get out of them. Perhaps the best way to deal with Wend was to show him it was nonsense by daring him to send her into the past. No. He could turn violent then. Best just to go. She slid carefully away along the glass cupboard and braced her sandals to run.
Wend smiled his polite smile. “Thanks. I was needing to get at this showcase. Your father wants some of the things moved.”
He fetched up his bunch of keys and advanced on the lock of the sliding door. He was far too near. Maewen could feel her stomach squirming and those queer pins and needles in her back that she always got when she was about to do something wrong. Strange the way Wend always made her feel like this. She slid further away, warily watching him as he undid the electronic lock and then the ordinary one. Any second now she would be far enough away to risk running for help.
Wend reached inside the glass cupboard and gently, almost reverently, picked up a small gold statue that was standing there among vases, salt cellars, rings and other golden objects. While Wend turned to her holding the statue in both hands – she could see it was heavy – Maewen craned to see the label it had been standing on.
FIGURE OF KING OR NOBLE (GOLD).
PREHISTORIC. ORIGIN UNKNOWN.
“This is the image of the One that my family once guarded,” Wend said. The radio on his belt beeped as he spoke. He frowned. “Would you take this to your father for me? Someone wants me.”
He held the small golden image out. It was the ideal excuse for going away. Maewen reached out gladly and took hold of the image in both hands. The thing was so worn and old that all you could say of it was that it had once had a face and wore a long sort of poncho robe, but the instant she touched it she had the queer doing-wrong feeling worse than before. Her teeth ached with it, and her hair tried to lift. She snatched her hands away. But by then the pins and needles were worse down her hands and legs and through her face. It seemed to affect her eyes, so that the long empty room grew foggy, and her ears, so that she could only dimly hear Wend’s beeping radio.
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THE FOGGINESS WAS cold as well as thick. Maewen lost all sense of direction. She staggered and found her sandals were getting wet in short grass beaded with fog drops. It felt icy. “Oh – ouch!” she cried out.
Her voice had the unechoing clarity of somewhere outside – and high up too, she thought, having been brought up among mountains. Anyway it was nothing like the woody, stony echoes inside the museum gallery. She looked up and around in a panic. Everything was mist, thick white mist, except for – thank goodness! – one pink streak of dawn over to the right. And there was something dark ahead through the mist. Maewen took a couple of excruciating cold, wet strides towards the dark thing, enough to numb her feet, and found the thing was a round stone a little higher than her waist with a hole in the middle. A waystone? It was only about a tenth the size of the one outside the station in Kernsburgh, but she supposed that was what it might be.
She stood shivering in her scanty summer shorts and shirt, staring at the stone resentfully. It’s real! she thought. Wend tricked me! I’m in shock! I’m going to die of exposure, and I haven’t the faintest idea where I am! Or when!
Here she noticed that the pins and needles feeling was no longer with her. It had been replaced – some seconds ago, now she thought about it – by a much better feeling, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. Well, I hope so! she thought. I could scream, only there doesn’t seem to be anyone around to hear.
She began to feel definitely warmer.
She looked down in time to see her sandals closing over and growing up her legs into stout-looking boots. Her shorts were growing downwards into felty, rather baggy trousers that tucked into the boots. A faint jingling alerted her to the fact that her shirt was also growing, and multiplying, into linked mail with one thinnish shirt under it and another, thicker one on top. A heaviness on her head caused her hand to leap up there. She touched metal. She now had a light domed helmet on.
She felt a mad, hilarious pleasure. I’m a warrior maid! I’m changing into a fighting girl under my own eyes – what I can see of myself! Her feet were still frozen inside the boots, and her hands were no warmer, but she nevertheless had a warm, cared-for feeling. Something – the golden statue? – was looking after her.
There was another jingling over to the right. Maewen whirled like a wild animal. The jingling mixed with a pruff of breath, a sound that she knew very well. She moved warily over that way, jingling herself. Sure enough, looming out of the mist, dark against the pink stripe of dawn, was a horse, standing patiently waiting for someone. Not a bad horse, though rather shaggy, as far as she could see, and it was saddled and bridled, with a roll of baggage behind the saddle. It turned and blew steamy breath at Maewen as if it knew her.
