The room was white with the moon as it had been on the night that the child died, but it was too early in the year for the nightingale. It had the blank anonymity of emptiness so that I knew Guenhumara was not there, even before I saw the rugs smooth and unrumpled on the bed place, only a faint hollow on the side, as though she had sat there for a while.
I stood for a long moment, thinking too, while the cold emptiness of the room seeped into me. It was warm between thy breasts, Lalage; the old song scurried senselessly round and round in my head, as though in search of escape. I wanted some way of escape, too, but I did not know from what. I went out and down the stairs again.
Riada had returned with wine in my own big silver cup with the ram’s-head handles, and a couple of servants had appeared, blinking and in hurriedly dragged-on clothes. I turned on Sasticca, she who had taken old Blanid’s place, and demanded, “Where is my Lady, the Queen?”
She gaped at me, scarce fully awake. “Eh, my lord, we did not expect you this night, or there should have been a better welcome —”
“The Queen,” I said, “where is the Queen?”
“My mistress could not sleep, she said the moon was too bright. She went out to walk in the garden, and bade us not to bide waiting for her.“
Relief of a sort swept over me. In the garden that stretched beyond the widespread warren of the palace, she would like enough have heard nothing of our return. For a moment it was in my mind to go out after her, and meet her in the crown of windflowers that she had made herself for some whim; but if she had gone to walk in the garden at night, it was maybe because she wanted to walk alone. I could wait a while at least.
So I dismissed the servants back to their sleeping places, and, when they were gone, took the wine cup from Riada, and drank. As I did so, I saw his gaze go past me to the colonnade door at my back, which he had left open when he brought the wine; saw him stiffen a little, and the thick russet brows draw together.
I swung around, and there in the doorway, with the cold sheen of the moonlight behind him, stood Medraut. I had not heard him come, for his footsteps were almost silent, the same light prowling tread that I have noticed in a hunchback before now. But there he was, and there it seemed that, like his mother, he might have stood waiting for a lifetime or so. His eyes pricked with spangles of cold blue fire that seemed not to come from the candles, in a face that would have been a mere white mask save for the working of the muscles about the mouth. I could not see what lay behind the mask. But whatever it was, I knew that it threatened my whole world.
He said — and in some strange way his voice, like his face, gave the impression of being masked — “Artos, my father, thank God that you are back. There is sore need of you here!”
“What need?” I demanded.
“Is there so much trust between you and me that you will believe my word? Come quickly and know the thing for yourself!”
“If you do not tell me, I do not come,” I said.
He stood as still as ever, looking at me; and I could have sworn that whatever else, there was a kind of struggling grief behind the white mask. I daresay he really believed in his own grief just then, for save for hate, he was so empty that he could feel whatever it suited him to feel. “Not even for my stepmother’s sake?” he said.
There was a moment’s complete silence in the atrium, and one fear that was already in me began to thicken like a cold mist. “Very well,” I said at last, and put down the half-empty wine cup.
Young Riada cried out to me sharply, “Sir — my Lord Artos, don’t go,” and his voice cracked with anxiety.
I felt for his shoulder and gave it a little shake, my gaze still holding and held by Medraut’s. “I’ll be back.”
In a kind of cold nightmare, the more terrible because the fear was for no known thing but fear existing in its own right, I walked out into the courtyard. Medraut drew back for me to pass, and then turned in with his light prowling step beside me. “Across the garden, that is the quickest way,” he said. I did not ask where to; I knew that I might as well ask the question of the winter rain as of the man beside me. In some ways he was stronger than I was. We went out through the furry blackness of the low arched alleyway under the store wing, and cut across the corner of the tangled garden, to the sprawl of courts and tumble-down buildings on the far side. This was the oldest part of the palace, dating from the first days of Rome-in-Britain, and had fallen into disuse save as storerooms and the like. A veritable honeycomb of courts and chambers linked one to another, black and white under the moon, empty of life as the city outside had seemed. In one place only, the remoteness of the moon was challenged by a smudge of smoky gold, where a torch high on the angle of two walls shed a little light into the alleyway that made a shortcut to the mews. Medraut reached up and took it from its iron sconce as we passed, and the shadows spun and darted flying before us and crowding in behind as we went on again.
At a gateway in the wall, I felt Medraut’s hand on my arm, urging me through without a word, and then we were in a narrow courtyard in the heart of the old palace. I knew the place well, though I had seen it seldom in the past thirty years, for I had kept my mongrel dog pack there when I was a boy. A well, whose water was still sweet — or had been then — was sunk in the midst of the place, and a wild pear tree overhung the wellhead. It had been a bird-sown sapling when I first came there; it was dead now, black and stark in the moonlight, its beauty turned skeletal, save for one living branch on which a few white flowers still unfurled their fragile petals in a last reaching out to the springtime.
The shadow of the flowering branch fled across the face of the storehouse opposite as Medraut, with the torch held high, moved forward, and the probing torchlight picked out the figure of a man standing with his drawn sword before the arched entrance, and other figures in darker corners, striking out in each case that glint of a drawn weapon.
I remember that for the split instant of time before the scene sprang to life, I wondered whether I had walked into a trap, and was to die as Constantine my grandfather had died, and whipped my hand to my sword hilt. Then as they stepped forward into the full torchlight, I saw that they were four or five of my own Companions, four or five boys of the new generation that I felt I scarcely knew. Now, clearly, they were acting under Medraut’s orders as they moved in toward the storehouse doorway, and Medraut himself stood back formally, that I might go first. I checked in the arched opening, and looked around at him, trying once more to see behind his mask. “What has Guenhumara to do with this place, Medraut? Why all the ugly mystery?”
“Let my father forgive me,” he said. “There was no other way,” and made a little gesture to me to go in and climb the steep curved stairway whose bottom steps showed waveringly in the torchlight.
I went in and began to climb, my giant-wise shadow climbing remorselessly ahead of me in the light of the torch which Medraut carried close behind. At the midway turn of the stair where the tawny light ran up into the darkness, my son slipped past me, and checked before a small deep-set door, and tried the latch with a small decisive rattle. Then, as the door did not open, he whipped out his dagger and beat upon the dusty timbers with its hilt. In the enclosed space of the stairway the sound seemed to beat upon one’s ears, and the echoes woke and flung to and fro like startled bats, but nothing else answered to the summons, and after a moment Medraut began to beat again, crying out in a strange high voice like that of a woman on the edge of hysteria. “Open up! Open in Caesar’s name, or we’ll smash the door in!” And I felt the other men pressing up behind me, eager as hounds that wait for the quarry to break cover. And suddenly I knew that the thing that mattered to me most in the world was that I should not see what lay behind that door.