In my mind I saw him, sitting in his armchair in front of the painting of my mother. His eyes were on me. Was everything a waste, all hope and effort, did everything shatter and fail? I could not think otherwise but he had, and perhaps had died with that belief outweighing the pain and betrayal. I owed him something.
I asked: “Where would you have me go?”
“To the Sanctuary. Where else?”
I nodded. “As you wish, then, sire.”
TEN
THE PRINCE IN WAITING
I LEFT THE CITY OF my birth in a shameful fashion. Ezzard found rags for me to wear and fixed a cloth hump on my back so that I looked like a polymuf. He for his part put on women’s clothes, a tattered gray cloak and a pointed hat, and walked slowly as though hobbled by old age. But the disguise was good. I saw several people who would have known me but they paid us no attention except one, a son of the kite-maker in West Street, who slashed at me with his stick when I was not quick enough in getting into the gutter to give him room.
We went out by the East Gate because there was more traffic through this than the North. Some of the soldiers on guard were drunk and singing. I looked back when we were outside, half dreading that my father’s head would still be spiked above it, but it had been taken down. I did not look back after that.
The baggage train of the Romsey army had already been taken into the city. The Contest Field was empty but scuffed and muddied by their occupation. I thought of my own day of glory there and of that last charge against Edmund which had won me the jeweled sword. It hung in my room in the palace now: I wondered who would get it.
I had asked Ezzard if I could say good-by to Edmund but had not been surprised that he refused. I had not even seen Martin again after he left me with the Seer. Already I might have been missed from the palace and word gone out to find me. I wondered what Edmund would think when it was known, as it must be soon enough, that Ezzard and I were both gone. That, having refused his offer to flee with me, I had run for aid to the Spirits, still hoping they would win me my inheritance? I would have liked to be able to tell him it was not so. But it did not really matter. Nothing mattered. It started to rain again. That didn’t matter either.
When we were well clear of the city we halted in the shelter of a clump of trees and I was able to get rid of my hump and both of us to dress ourselves in the more ordinary clothes we had brought in a bundle carried under my arm. We looked like farm workers now, or maybe vagrants. Before resuming our journey we ate there—a hunk of bread and cheese with an onion—and slaked our thirst at a stream nearby.
We had simple food to last us three days. It was five and twenty miles to the Sanctuary on crows’ wings, probably half as far again by road and at least twice the distance by the circuitous route which we must follow to give a wide berth to any place where we might be sought. The pigeons, if they were not already flying, would soon be out with orders for us to be arrested; and we could not be sure that this applied only in Winchester’s lands. The Princes of both Andover and Salisbury might be asked to trace the fugitives and might think themselves well advised to do so, as a favor to the man who had nailed Jeremy’s head on his palace gate.
We tramped steadily westward, using roads or tracks but taking cover when anyone came our way and keeping well away from villages. We went in silence, speaking only on necessary matters. I was not sorry for this. It was not that I was contented with my own thoughts: in fact they followed a treadmill of anger, resentment, jealousy and despair. Certain moments and events came back again and again, and seemed each time to leave me still more numb. My father’s head on the spike above the East Gate . . . the Captains giving their voice to Peter while the rain slashed against the walls of the conference tent . . . the crowd in front of the palace roaring for him . . . But I knew no conversation, with Ezzard or anyone else, would drive away those images or my feeling of black hopelessness. I suffered them better in silence.
The road to Stockbridge was over high ground but Stockbridge itself lay in the valley of the Test River. We left the road some miles from the town and went north. In the early evening we could look down and see the distant town and the river running through. I remembered we must cross it and wondered what Ezzard proposed. Even from here, a quarter of a mile away, it looked turbulent, swollen with the waters of the spring thaw. Swim it? And spend the night freezing in soaked clothes? I asked Ezzard.
“You see the high-road that runs this side of it?” I nodded. “Two miles north of here it crosses the river.”
We made our way across a field to the high-road. At this point it was not, in fact, very high, only a few feet above the level of the surrounding land. We walked beside it until it was necessary to go on it to cross the river. Dusk was heavy by now and we saw no one. The road was carried over the river by a metal bridge. Ezzard said suddenly:
“Have you ever wondered, Luke, why our ancestors built the high-roads?”
There were two near Winchester, forming an ellipse that enclosed the city. I shook my head.
“No, sire.”
“Your friend Martin has done so.”
“He has strange thoughts.” I realized that this could seem a criticism and endanger him, he being an Acolyte, and added: “I do not mean impious ones.”
Ezzard did not seem to notice it. He went on:
“Or why they are made as they are? We call them high-roads because sometimes they stand high above the fields. But in other places, as at Shawford, they run in valleys cut out of the hills. Have you ever thought of this?”
I said I had not. He stooped and pointed to where one of the thick timbers, which were still found in places on the high-roads though mostly they had been taken for winter fuel, was raised a little above the dirt.
“Or what these were for?”
Near one end the beam carried a metal socket that looked as though it in turn had supported something, a rail perhaps, running transversely across it. I said:
“I suppose they were to do with machines.”
I felt guilt in even speaking the word in the presence of the Seer, but he had asked strange questions. He said:
“And these machines—were they so much weaker than a horse that they could only travel on level ground; and therefore the high-roads had to be raised up or brought down, not taking the shape of the country through which they passed?”
I said: “I do not know, sire.”
I was embarrassed. Such speculations surely were forbidden. It might be different for the Seers, who served the Spirits, but I had no right to think them.
He did not speak again for a time. Then he said:
“You must prepare yourself for strange things at the Sanctuary, Luke.”
“Yes, sire.”
Of course there must be strange things—I knew that. Like a Seance going on all the time, perhaps: darkness with lights and bells and the sonorous voices of the Spirits. Ezzard said:
“Strange things to learn as well as to see. Your mind may be amazed by some of them.” He paused but I said nothing. “You are strong in many ways, but curiosity is not one. I do not suppose it is necessary. But it would have been better if we had had more time to prepare you.”
I did not understand what he meant but was not sufficiently interested to want to find out. I was tired and hungry, my feet sore from walking all day. I was glad when we came to one of the broken-down huts which you find here and there on the high-roads and Ezzard called a halt.
• • •
We slept the second night in a barn. The straw from last year’s threshing made a warm bed—it had been cold in the hut with no blanket—but I slept badly. A rat ran over my arm and lying awake I heard them scuffling. I have a dread and loathing of these beasts from the time when I was a child of two or three and an old cat of ours, a hunter, brought one back and laid it on my pillow; and I awoke and in the dim glow of the night light saw its dead face close to mine. I got up and went outside. The night was almost clear, bright stars everywhere, and the fires of the Burning Lands brighter than I had ever seen them. We were nearer to them now, of course. I huddled up against the side of the barn, staring at them while I went the same dreary round of memory and anger and melancholy. In the end, despite my cramped position and the cold, I fell asleep. I was wakened by Ezzard’s voice calling my name in the thin dawn light. I answered and he came to me. There was relief in his face. He said: