“Me and Oswald and Master Paton and young Jacques, we was all new to our jobs, see,” Walt was saying. “We didn’t have no grumble with Bishop Rowley, not like the old guard, as was cross with him for being a king’s man. Master Paton and Jacques, they joined selfsame day as he was installed.”
So with the great divide between king and martyr running through the diocese of Saint Albans, its new bishop had chosen servants as fresh to their roles as he was to his.
Good for you, Rowley. Judging by Walt and Jacques, you’ve done well.
The messenger, however, was proving less imperturbable than the groom. “Should we shout for help, my lord?” Adelia heard him ask Rowley.
For once, his bishop was gentle with him. “Not long now, my son. We’re nearly out.”
He couldn’t know it, but, in fact, they were. Adelia had just seen proof that they were, though she was afraid the bishop would receive little satisfaction from it.
Walt grunted. He’d seen what she’d seen-ahead in the tunnel was a pile of rounded balls of manure.
“That un dropped that as we was coming in,” Walt said quietly, nodding toward the horse Adelia was leading; it had been his own, the last in line when they entered the maze. The four of them would soon be out-but exactly where they had started.
“It was always an even chance.” Adelia sighed. “Bugger.”
The two men behind hadn’t heard the exchange, nor, by the time the hooves of the front two horses had flattened them in passing, did just another lot of equine droppings have any significance for them.
Another bend in the tunnel. Light. An opening.
Dreading the outburst that must follow, Adelia and her horse stepped through the cleft leading out of the Wyrm’s maze to be met by clean, scentless cold air and a setting sun illuminating the view of a great bell hanging from a trapezoid set in a hill they had descended more than two hours before.
One by one, the others emerged. There was silence.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adelia shouted into it. She faced Rowley. “Don’t you see, if a maze is continuous, if there aren’t any breaks, and if all the hedges are connected to each other and you follow one of them and stick rigidly to it wherever it goes, you’ll traverse it eventually, you must, it’s inevitable, only…” Her voice diminished into a misery. “I chose the left-hand hedge. It was the wrong one.”
More silence. In the dying light, crows flapped joyously over the elm tops, their calls mocking the earthbound idiots below.
“Forgive me,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said politely. “Do I understand that if we’d followed the right-hand hedge, we could have eventually reached the destination we wanted in the first bloody place?”
“Yes.”
“The right-hand hedge?” the bishop persisted.
“Well…obviously, to go back it would be on the left-hand again… Are you taking us back in?”
“Yes,” the bishop said.
Lord, Lord, he’s taking us back in. We’ll be here all night. I wonder if Allie’s all right.
They rang the great bell again, in case the figure they’d seen on the tower’s walkway had relented, but, by the time they’d watered the horses at the trough, it was obvious that he or she had not.
Nobody spoke as loins were girded and a lantern lit. It was going to be very dark in there.
Rowley swept his cap off his head and knelt. “Be with us, Lord, for the sake of Thy dear Son.”
Thus, the four reentered the maze. Knowing that it had an end made their minds easier, though the cost of constantly twisting and turning and backing out of the blind alleys was higher now that they were tiring.
“How’d you learn of mazes, mistress?” Walt wanted to know.
“My foster father. He’s traveled extensively in the East, where he saw some, though not as big.”
“Proper old Wyrm, this, i’n it? Reckon there’s a way through as we’m not seeing.”
Adelia agreed with him. To be girded to this extent from the outside world would be an intolerable inconvenience; there had to be a straighter route. She suspected that some of the blind ends that appeared to be stone and hedge walls were not lined by masonry at all; they were gates with blackthorn trained over them that could open and shut on a direct path.
No good to her and the others, though. Investigating each one to see if it were movable would take too long and would result only in having to make further choices of tunnels that ended in fixtures.
They were condemned to the long way through.
They made it in silence. Even Walt stopped talking.
Nighttime brought the maze to life. The long-dead trickster who had designed it still tried to frighten them, but they knew him now. Nevertheless, the place had its own means of instilling dread; lantern light lit a thick tube of laced branches as if the men and the woman in it were struggling through an interminable gray stocking infested by creatures that, unseen, rustled out their dry existence in its web.
By the time they emerged, it was too dark to see whether the cleft they stepped through was ornamented like the entrance. They’d lost interest, anyway; amusement had left them.
The tunnels had to some extent protected them from the bitter air that assailed them now. Apart from an owl that, disturbed by their coming, took off from a wall with a slow clap of wings, there was no sound from the tower that faced them across the bailey. It was more massive than it had appeared from a distance, rising sheer and high toward a sky where stars twinkled icily down on it like scattered diamonds.
Jacques produced another lantern and fresh candles from his saddlebag and led them toward a blacker shape in the shadows at the tower’s base that indicated the steps to a door.
Nobody had crossed the bailey since the snow fell; nothing human, anyway-there were animal and bird prints aplenty. But the place was an obstacle course. Snowy bumps proved to be abandoned goods: a broken chair, pieces of cloth, a barrel with its staves crushed on one side, battered pans, a ladle. The snow covered a scene of chaos.
Walt, stumbling, revealed a bucket with a dead hen inside. The corpse of a dog, frozen in the act of snarling, lay at the end of its chain.
Rowley gave the bucket a kick that dislodged the hen’s carcass. “The disloyal, thieving bastards.”
Was that what this was?
It had been said that when William the Norman died, his servants immediately stripped their king’s body and ran off with such of his possessions as they could carry, leaving his knights to find the great and terrible Conqueror’s corpse naked on the floor of an empty palace room.
Had Rosamund’s servants done the same the moment their mistress was dead? Rowley called it disloyalty, but Adelia remembered what she’d thought of Rosamund’s neglect of Bertha; loyalty could come only of exchange and mutual regard.
The door to the tower, when the four reached it, was of thick, black oak at the top of a flight of wickedly glistening steps. There was no knocker. They hammered on it but neither dead nor living answered them. The sound echoed as if into an empty cave.
Keeping together-nobody suggested separating-they filed around the tower’s base, through arched entrances to courtyards, to where another door proved as immovable as the first. It was, at least, on ground level.
“We’ll ram the swine.”
First, though, the horses had to be cared for. A path led to a deserted stable yard containing a well that responded with the sound of a splash when Walt dropped a stone down it, allaying his fear that its depths would prove frozen. The stalls had straw in them, if somewhat dirty, and their mangers had been replenished with oats not long before their former occupants had been stolen.