In this case she looked up and saw the Master coming toward her.
She stared at him blankly for a moment, believing he must be a mirage of her thoughts; perhaps her bees’ next trick was creating three-dimensional pictures. She blinked, but he remained the Master and did not dissolve into nothingness, or into a cloud of bees. She did not think even her bees could create the blackness of him.
She jerked to her feet, for you cannot remain seated in the presence of a standing Master, even in your own front garden, and even when he arrives unexpectedly. She didn’t think the Master was supposed to come to the Chalice; he was supposed to call her to come to him. But then she should be living in the House with him, where a message sent and answered involved no more than a few corridors and a flight of stairs or two.
She looked behind for the cart and driver which must have brought him, for she knew he could not walk so far, and saw a face she knew: old grey Ponty, who might have retired years ago, except he went on being sound and healthy and happy to see his tack appear—and as steady a pony as had ever carried a rider. He gave dogcart rides on feast-days to children who were fascinated by a smaller, quicker, more graceful version of the big farm horses most of them knew best. He looked fat and sleek and untroubled as he browsed the edge of her little clearing for savoury grasses. As she looked at him he raised his head and took a step forward into the sunlight as if appreciating the warmth, or as if to say to her: “All is well.” She couldn’t see his eyes through his thick forelock, but his ears, themselves barely visible, were pointed straight at her.
“Ponty,” she said stupidly.
“Most horses prefer to avoid me,” said the Master. “Ponty came straight up to me and asked for apples, which I have been careful to provide since then. He is also the image of his mother, who taught me to ride.”
A memory she had no idea she had rose in her mind’s eye: she was a very little girl going to the House with her mother—possibly for the first time, which was why it came to her so clearly. Her mother was carrying the pack Mirasol still used for transporting honey; when it was full of jars, you walked slowly enough for even quite a little girl to keep up with you, if she was a good walker, and Mirasol was, because her father often took her with him when he tended his trees. As they reached the drive from the forest track two older boys on horseback came trotting round the far side of the House and turned toward them.
Mirasol and her mother had already turned toward the back of the House but Mirasol had wanted to stop and watch; she liked horses, and knew the names of the work-horses and occasional riding pony whom she saw when she was out with her father. These two were from the House stables, and the one in the lead was very beautiful, although it threw its forelegs out in a nervous way. The boy on it suddenly gave it its head, and it shot forward, the boy easy and graceful in the saddle. It galloped past them, and Mirasol noticed that the boy was beautiful too. They made a splendid picture; but there was something in the way he ignored them that, young as she was, she did not like. It was not arrogance, but a kind of deliberate performance: he knew the effect they made and gloried in it. She turned her attention to the other boy. He was younger, and the horse he rode was only a pony. He followed the first boy, but remained trotting, and as he passed them he smiled and nodded, neatly but unshowily balancing the gesture against the motion of the trotting horse. He was ordinary-looking but he also looked—nice, Mirasol thought, a little wistfully; she missed having other children to play with. He was older than she, and he was from the House, but for a moment she had felt they might have been friends.
Her mother had stopped and was staring after the two boys. “That’s the Master’s two sons in a nutshell,” she murmured.
“Mama?” said Mirasol, but Mirasol’s mother shook her head and went on toward the House.
It was that ordinary boy who stood before her now. Half in the old memory and half in the shock of the moment she stumbled into speech: “You—you might have sent for me—or—or—Someone—anyone—would have been honoured to have been asked to bring you—anywhere—”
“Honoured?” he said. The sunlight fell upon his black cloak and disappeared in its folds. A small breeze stirred, although the cloak moved oddly in response, and as the fabric brushed against the body it concealed she was again reminded of her sense that even the shape of his body was no longer quite human.
There was a brief silence, and she realised, too late again, that this was not how a Chalice, or anyone else, greeted a Master. Was it herself, her own worries and preoccupations—her own inability to fit into the skin of the role she now played—that kept making her behave so, or was it the strangeness of him? Or was it the unexpected memory of him as a boy she would have liked to have had as a friend?
Breathlessly she said, “I am honoured by your presence here. You are most welcome….”
He’d come halfway across the meadow and had stopped, waiting, as it seemed, gravely.
“Welcome,” she said again, still feeling dizzy and confused, but realising she meant it. He was welcome. “May I offer you—” She stopped. She had no idea what a Chalice was supposed to offer a Master who visited her at her home. There must be a tradition, a right thing, even perhaps a rule. But it was not an eventuality it had occurred to her she needed to prepare for. And perhaps there was no rule after all, because the Chalice should have lived at the House, at the House with the Master.
“Honey,” he said. “Will you offer me honey?”
“Of course,” she said, still wit-scattered. “Anything—anything I can offer you.”
“Honey, please,” he said politely, as if he were anyone—as if he were one of her customers.
She looked at him bemusedly. Which honey? Not the sleepy. The energetic? One of the ache-soothers? Which one? One of the ones she hadn’t figured out yet (maybe they were just to make dull bread or porridge taste wonderful)?
“Of course,” she said, and went indoors, as much to hide her confusion from him—but what did he see with his uncanny eyes?—as to fetch the honey. She went to the shelf where she kept the jars in use, and put her hand out blindly, choosing by not choosing: and so her hand reached itself, and took down a jar.
It was one of the mysterious ones: she knew neither what it was for nor what it was made of. It was an early-summer honey, and she could taste the yellow singers and the wild cherry, but there was something else in it as well. Perhaps it’s a confusion-tamer, she thought, and the choice is really for me.
She took two spoons, which is what she would normally do for a friend—or had done when she had had friends. But it was only as she picked up the second spoon that it occurred to her that this honey was also her secret favourite, and that she liked not knowing what was in it, and had silly fantasies about what it might be for, besides making dull bread or porridge taste wonderful. Would a Master eat honey straight out of the jar? She dithered a moment longer, and then made up a tray, with a half loaf of bread and a knife, and two cups, and a pitcher of water drawn that morning from the cottage well—whose water now had the faintest sweet taste, as if a little honey were leaking into its source.
He was sitting in one of the stone chairs when she came back outside again. She had noticed before that he rarely stood for long; she wondered if the Hardbutt family furniture was to him any improvement on standing, but he looked, she thought, almost relaxed. More relaxed, anyway, than he had ever been during all the gatherings she had stood Chalice to.