The Crown of Dalemark

MAEWEN CAME BACK to the present with a jump. For a moment there it had seemed as if the noise of the train was not the beat of wheels on tracks, but the sound of water rilling over stones. She had almost seemed to see young leaves rustling overhead, casting a mix of sunspots and shadow on the racing water. In the confusion of glints she could have sworn there was a brighter glint, hands diving for the brightness, voices, and then the brightness taking the form of a dripping golden statuette.

Nonsense, of course. She must have dropped off to sleep while the train was rushing into this deep green cutting – such a deep one that there was no sign of the mountains beyond – and the glint had to be the gold buttons of the guard, just passing on his regular walk down the corridors. The guard smiled gravely at Maewen with his head cocked to one side. Was she all right?

Maewen managed a sort of smile, and the guard passed on. She prickled all over with embarrassment again. It was too bad of Aunt Liss. Mum would just have given Maewen a vague kiss and waved goodbye, but Aunt Liss, being the practical sister, had had to collar the guard and explain loudly and at length. “This is my niece’s first-ever train journey. She’s going all the way to Kernsburgh to visit her father and I don’t like to think of her going all that way without someone to keep an eye on her. Could you make sure she’s all right? Can I leave her in your tender care?”

And so on for five minutes, while Maewen wished she were anywhere else and hoped the other four passengers in the carriage were all deaf. As if she were ten years old instead of nearly fourteen! The worst of it was that the guard was quite young and rather good-looking. He probably did think Maewen was only ten. She was unfortunately small for her age. He listened seriously to Aunt Liss and eventually took his cap off, baring his beautiful white-fair curls, and bowed slightly.

“Thank you, madam. You can safely leave your niece to me.”

Looking back on it, Maewen wondered if the guard hadn’t been making fun of Aunt Liss, but it hadn’t seemed like that at the time, and Maewen had spent the entire space between Adenmouth and Kredindale trying to hide her hot face and squirming all over.

The silly part was that Maewen usually got on with Aunt Liss, better than with Mum. Aunt Liss was the one who cared. While Mum wandered in her studio covering her strange gawky statues with metal rags and splashes of bright colour, deaf and blind to the world, Aunt Liss made sure Maewen had meals and clothes and – most important of all to Maewen – a horse to ride. Aunt Liss earned day-to-day money by running a livery stable. When Mum sold a statue, she earned big money, but that only happened—

“Are you travelling far, young lady?” asked the passenger opposite, making her jump again. He must have got on the train at Orilsway or somewhere. She looked at him, trying to remember, and decided she must have been asleep when he got on because she had certainly not noticed him before. He was one of those wide kind of old men who are almost bell-shaped sitting down. He had a sheet of wriggly grey hair on either side of his wide, plump face. Maewen was not sure she liked the way his eyes were half hooded in fat eyelids – it made him look cunning and rather cruel – but his question had been perfectly polite, and she supposed she had better answer.

“Just to Kernsburgh.”

“Indeed?” he said. “And where did you get on?”

“Adenmouth,” said Maewen.

“From the furthest north,” said the old man, “halfway down the country to King Hern’s city of gold. That is a momentous journey, child. At one time it was the royal road to the crown of Dalemark.” He chuckled in a windy, breathy way. “And what brings you on the paths of the Undying?”

What a silly way to talk! Maewen thought. There are people who travel between Adenmouth and Kernsburgh every day of the week. “I’m going to visit my father,” she said. Up to this moment she had secretly thought this was the greatest adventure of her life, but thanks to this old man, it was suddenly ordinary and boring. “For the holidays,” she added drearily.

“Your father,” said the old man, in a breathy sort of pounce, “works away from home? In Kernsburgh? Eh?”

“Yes,” said Maewen.

“You travel to see him often?”

“No,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve been.” And she wished she could end this conversation. She did not like the old man’s voice. There was something odd about it.

“Ah, I see. He’s only just gone to work in Kernsburgh, is that it? Eh?”

“No. He’s worked there for the last seven years.” What was so odd about his voice? It almost seemed as if the sound was not coming from the old man at all but from somewhere else quite a long way away. Perhaps he was one of those people who had had surgery on his larynx and had to use a false voice box, in which case he was unfortunate and she ought to be polite to him. Maewen tried to explain without giving away her entire family history. “I haven’t seen him since I was – was a lot younger.” She really did not want to tell him her age, which he would know if she told him her parents had been divorced when she was seven.

“Now why is that?” the old man asked. “Do your parents perhaps not get on? They seem to have lived a long way apart for most of your life.”

Cheek! Maewen thought. It’s none of his business. “My mother,” she explained haughtily, “is a sculptor who prefers to work near the stone she uses. And my father is a very busy man. He’s Head Curator of the Tannoreth Palace.”

“Ah,” said the old man. She really did not like his half-hooded eyes. She looked away. “So you are truly on your way to the royal palace?” he said. He seemed very pleased. “And travelling all on your own until we met, eh? Now you can travel with me.” He leant forwards. The carriage seemed full of his wheezing breath, as if it were coming from outside into him, instead of the right way.

For one horrid moment Maewen thought he was going to pat her knee. She surged herself right to the back of her seat, but that did not seem nearly far enough away.

“I will be with you from now on,” he said, leaning at her. “Think of me as a friend.”

No! Help! Maewen thought. She looked at the other passengers. Three were asleep, and the other was deep in a book. She thought of putting her feet up and kneeling sideways out of reach of the old man’s fat hand hovering to pat her. And the guard only just went past, she thought, so it’ll be hours before he comes back again.

“Look me in the eyes,” said the old man, “and tell me you think of me as a friend.”

His face seemed to be right in front of hers, filling all she could see. Maewen shut her eyes. Let the guard come! she prayed. Let somebody help!

And here, like a miracle, the carriage door was sliding back and the guard’s solemn good-looking face was leaning round it. “Are you all right in here?”

“I … oh … yes … no … he—” Stop stammering and say he tried to pat your knee, you fool! “He—” Maewen turned to point at the seat opposite and found herself stammering again, this time with astonished embarrassment. The seat was empty. A quick look round the carriage showed her that there were only four passengers, three asleep, one reading. “But he … there was … I thought an old man … I mean—”

The guard shifted his head to look gravely at the empty seat. “I don’t think he’ll bother you again,” he said, perfectly straight-faced and polite, and he shut the door and went away.

Maewen sat back hot and squirming, worse than before. If one more thing happens with that guard, I think I shall die! She must have fallen asleep and dreamt the old man. What had possessed her to have a sinister little dream like that? Probably, deep down, she was terrified of seeing Dad again. Determined to stay awake from now on, she sat looking out at the mountains, dun-coloured shoulders, green steeps, black crags and blue jagged distances spinning past as the train thundered through the centre of North Dalemark. She thought firmly of Dad, to conquer her nerves. He had written over and over again to ask Maewen to visit him. He must really want to see her. But Mum just said irritably that she was not letting Maewen go until she was old enough to take care of herself. “Because he’s quite likely to forget you exist after half a day,” she said. “You’d starve or worse.” She went on to a tirade about how wrapped up Dad was in his work.

Maewen grinned. That, coming from Mum, was rich. But it seemed to have been the main reason for the divorce. Dad just kept forgetting he had a wife and daughter. She felt that if Dad turned out to be a male version of Mum, she could cope. She was used to it. It was worth it for the chance of living in the royal palace of Amil the Great in the middle of the capital city. But what if Dad turned out unpleasant? Maewen had always found it hard to believe that you could divorce someone just for being vague. After all, she had never felt the slightest desire herself to divorce Mum. That made her grin again.

By the time the train slowed and rolled creaking into Kernsburgh Central Station, Maewen was feeling quite cheerful and poised. But that was in her mind. Her body persisted in thinking it was very nervous, and her arms felt like string as she tried to heave her suitcase off the train. It was blocking the door, and she could sense the crowd of passengers behind getting more and more irritated. But just as she was getting truly flustered, here was the polite, attentive guard again, giving her a serious smile and picking up her case for her.

“Let me carry that.”

He set off into the station, and she pattered after him, grateful even though he was looking after her like a baby. The station was much larger than she had expected, high and ringing with announcements and people’s voices and feet, and full of big red pillars that made all the parts of it look the same.

“My father is meeting me,” she began defensively.

She saw Dad as she said it, coming through hordes of people going the other way. He was reading from a bundle of notes in his hand, and it was clear that the other people pushing past just did not exist for him. The sight took Maewen instantly back seven years. It was a pure delight the way Dad stood out from everyone else by being so trim and clear-cut – but not for being tall, she realised as Dad came close. He only came up to the guard’s shoulder. So that’s where I get my smallness from! she thought, and for one mad moment she wondered if Mum had divorced Dad because Mum herself was so tall and willowy.

Dad looked up from his notes and recognised her as if he had only seen her yesterday. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You don’t look a bit like this photo.” He turned the bundle of notes round to show her the snapshot clipped to the front. It was one Maewen had never liked, herself all long-faced and freckled with her arm over a horse, not unlike the horse, and the horse the better-looking of the two. “I suppose that’s how your aunt Liss likes to see you,” Dad remarked. “She sent the photo, of course.”

There was a slight awkwardness then as Dad bent a bit and kissed her cheek and did not quite give Maewen time to kiss him back. He smelt just the same as she remembered, with pipe smoke somewhere. He wheeled away almost at once to stare at the guard. “You needn’t have bothered, Wend,” he said. “I can be trusted to remember to meet my own daughter, I hope.” He had put back his head and gone all haughty. Maewen remembered that haughtiness well. Was it the haughtiness that had caused the divorce really?

“I was supposed to take care of her, sir,” said the guard. “Or so I thought.”

Maewen turned to stare at him. She had thought the uniform he was wearing was a railway one, but now she saw it was a paler blue and that the cap was wrong. How puzzling.

“I take it you two have met,” Dad said. He was still haughty. He went on with the utmost sarcasm, “Maewen, my chief assistant, Wend Orilson. Wend, my daughter, Mayelbridwen Singer.” Then he swung round and strode rapidly towards the way out, leaving Maewen to dither, not knowing whether to run after him or stay with the puzzling Wend and her suitcase.

She arrived at the exit doing neither, partly chasing Dad and then stopping and turning to look at Wend, wondering if she had the nerve to ask him if Dad had really sent him all the way to Adenmouth to collect her, and then forgotten – and then not daring and running after Dad again. They arrived outside in single file, into a roar of traffic and much hotter sun than Maewen was used to. There was a vast stone, round, with a hole in the middle, upended in the traffic island in front of the station. Its huge shadow fell across the front half of the queue for taxis.

“We won’t need a taxi; it’s no distance,” Dad said. He pointed to the huge stone. “The old waystone,” he said, and set off striding into the town, “marking the start of the ancient road system of North Dalemark. King Hern, or most probably his descendants, made the roads, but simple people often thought the gods made them and tended to call them the paths of the Undying.”

Maewen pattered after him up a broad thoroughfare, listening to as much as she could hear of a series of little lectures. After the waystone, it was the traffic, then the circular road system invented by Amil the Great, then the goods sold in the expensive shops she could see on either side. Somewhere along the street, Wend caught up, carrying her suitcase, and she thought he said, “I’ll explain later,” but she was too confused to be sure.

She forgot everything, anyway, when they came between giant gilded gates in a high wall and she had her first sight of the palace. It was across a cobbled court, and it was majestic. Like a very graceful cliff, she thought, almost too big to take in, and all upright lines that made it look taller still. In front of it, right in the middle of the court, there was a very much smaller building. It caught Maewen’s attention for being so different from the palace that it looked quite out of place. It was like a house-sized model of a fairytale palace, with three small onion domes and such numbers of spiral towers that it looked almost absurd.

“Whatever is that?” she said.

“That? Oh, that’s the tomb of Amil the Great,” her father told her, and followed this up with one of the little lectures Maewen was coming to expect. “He completed the old part of the palace two hundred years ago, quite early in his reign. That’s Amil’s old facade we’re looking at now; those recessed arcades along the lower storeys were one of his own ideas. He was always full of ideas, but towards the end of his reign the ideas got rather out of hand, I’m afraid. Amil seemed to become obsessed with death and evil. He divided his time between having this tomb built and journeying all over the kingdom to eradicate what he called ‘pockets of Kankredin’. He simply meant places where there was injustice or lawlessness, but he had become very eccentric by then, and he preferred to call them that.”

“He was very old when he died, wasn’t he?” Maewen asked.

“Nearly ninety,” said Dad. “Come on inside. Give me that case, Wend. We’ll go up in the lift for once.” He set off across the big space, over a pattern of cobbles and flagstones, still lecturing. “Amil had seen this country through from two primitive groups of earldoms to a fully industrial society, so I think he earned the right to be a little eccentric. That tomb is by way of being his folly.”