'Interesting how?' Aide glanced curiously up at Gil, holding her son's hands in her own.
'Because it looks as if by that time they had completely disassociated the idea of the Dark from the Nests. Which is less surprising than it seems,' she went on, 'when you consider that the bonfire was the first line of defence against the Dark. Which, of course, is why we have no records at all from the Time of the Dark itself.'
Aide let Tir down, and the child crawled determinedly away in pursuit of his ball. 'How vexing,' she said, inadequately.
'Well, more than that.' Gil sat on the narrow bed of grain sacks and covered her cold feet with her cloak. 'It left everybody completely unprepared for it when it happened again. I mean, before last summer nobody had even heard of the Dark.'
'Oh, but we had,' Aide protested. 'That's what - In a way it worked against Ingold, you see. When I was a little girl, my nurse Medda used to tell me not to get out of bed and run about the house at night because the Dark Ones would eat me up. I think all nurses used to tell their children that.' Her voice
faltered - in the end it had been Medda who had been eaten up by the Dark. 'It was something you grew out of. Most little children believed in the Dark Ones. It was only their parents who didn't.'
Gil momentarily pictured the probable fate of any shabby and unlikely pilgrim who tried to convince the authorities that the bogeyman was really going to devour America. 'I'm surprised Eldor believed him,' she murmured.
'Eldor- ' Minalde paused. 'Eldor was very exceptional. And he trusted Ingold. Ingold was his tutor when he was a child.'
Gil glanced up quickly, hearing the sudden tension that choked off Aide's voice. The younger girl was looking determinedly away into the distance, fighting the film of tears that had appeared so abruptly in her eyes. Whatever her love for Rudy, Gil thought, there is a love there which can never be denied. In the strained silence which followed, Melantrys' voice could be heard, arguing with Seya about whether or not she should get rid of her cloak in a sword fight.
Then Aide forced a small rueful smile and brushed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. 'I'm sorry.'
'It's okay.'
'No,' Aide said. 'It's just that sometimes I don't understand what there was between me and - and Eldor. As if I never understood it. I thought I could make him love me if I loved him hard enough. Maybe I was just being stupid.' She wiped her eyes again. 'But it hurts, you know, when you give everything you have and the one you give it to just just looks at it and turns aside.' She glanced away again, unable to meet Gil's eyes. Gil, clumsy-tongued and unhandy with her own or anyone else's emotions, could find nothing to say.
But Aide seemed to take no offence at the silence. In fact, she seemed to find a kind of comfort in it. Tir, having reached the end of the room, came crawling back toward the girls with his usual single-minded determination, and Aide smiled as she bent
to help him stand once more. He was very much like Aide, Gil thought, watching mother and child together - small-boned and compact, with her wide morning-glory-blue eyes. Just as well, she added to herself, that there's so little of Eldor in his only child. When you're carrying on an affair with a man the Church says is a servant of Satan, it's no help to have the echo of his predecessor before your eyes every time you turn around.
Aide looked up suddenly, as if deliberately putting aside the pain and confusion of that first, hopeless love. 'So where were you?' she asked Gil. The Guards said you'd left right after breakfast.'
'Oh.' Gil shrugged. 'Exploring, looking for something, really... You've never run across any mention anywhere of a - a kind of observation room in the Keep, have you? A room with a black stone table in it, with a crystal kind of thing in the middle?'
'No.' Then Aide frowned, her black brows drawing down into two swooping wings. 'But that's funny - it sounds so familiar. A table - has it a crystal disc, set into the top of the table?'
'Yeah,' Gil said. 'It's part of the table. How did you know?*
'I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but - almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny,' Aide went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted on to her knee, promptly reached for the jewelled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.
Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. 'Why is it funny?' she asked.
'Because - I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep,' Aide said in a worried voice. 'As if as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having
been there before.'
'Like deja vu?' There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that - a circumstance which Gil found interesting.
'Not entirely.'
'Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?' Gil asked quietly. 'You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare.'
Aide looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. 'But the memories only pass from father to son,' she said softly. 'And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just - feelings.'
'Maybe women hold inherited memory differently,' Gil said. 'Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to.' Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she sat on scrunching softly and giving off a faint musty odour into the tiny room. 'I remember a long time ago, Ingold said that Eldor's father Umar didn't have Dare's memories at all, because there was really no need - that the inherited memory will skip generations, one or three or sometimes more. But he said that they woke in Eldor because it was necessary.'
Minalde was silent, looking down at the child who played so obliviously in her lap. Her unbound hair hid her expression, but when she did speak, her voice was soft and filled with doubt. 'I don't know,' she said.
Gil stood up briskly. 'I think it's neat,' she announced.
'Do you?' Aide asked timidly.
'Hell, yes. Come on exploring with me. See what you can remember.'
As the winter deepened and the snows sealed the Vale into a
self- contained world of whiteness, Gil and Minalde conducted their own rather unsystematic exploration of the Keep of Dare. They wandered the upper reaches of the fourth and fifth levels, where Maia of Thran had established his headquarters. He greeted them amiably in his own church down near the western end, with his own armed troops about him. They explored the crowded slums that huddled around the stairheads on the fifth level, hearing nothing but the liquid southern drawl of the Penambrans in their ears, and probed the dark, empty halls that stretched beyond. Armed like Theseus with a ball of twine, they traversed miles of dark, abandoned halls that stank of mould and dry rot, with the dust of ages drifting like ground fog about their feet.
They found storerooms, chapels, and armouries filled with rusted weapons in the back halls of all levels. They found the remains of bridges that had once spanned the Aisle at the fourth and fifth levels, thin spiderwebs of cable heretofore hidden by the clustering shadows of the ceiling. They found cells stacked halfway to the ceiling with spiky mazes of piled furniture, carved in unfamiliar styles and painted with thin running lines of hearts and diamonds picked out in golf leaf. They passed locked cells scurrying with rats, food stores cached by unknown speculators. They discovered things they did not understand mouldering parchments overwritten in debased and unreadable bookhand, or what looked like puzzling little white polyhedrons made of milky glass, three-quarters the size of Gil's fist, their function unknown and unguessable.