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Pretty came dashing up as they landed by the stables and Beauty almost snapped at him. She was as tired as Derk was. “At this rate,” Derk told Shona, who came to help him unsaddle Beauty, “we shall be worn to shadows.”
“Black shadows with red eyes?” Shona said. “Lucky you. Just what Mr Chesney ordered.”
Derk felt a rush of gratitude to Shona. When the time came, he would make the human half of the mermaid daughter from Shona’s cells. It would ensure excellence.
“And do you know,” Shona said, “those lazy boys haven’t done a thing today unless I nagged them. Elda’s just as bad. I haven’t had time to practise. Every time I tried, a new pigeon arrived. The messages are all over your desk. Dad, you ought to breed pigeons that can speak. It would be much easier.”
“That’s quite an idea, Derk said, “but it’s not something I can think of just now. I shall have to go and see Querida tomorrow. There were two important things she said she’d do for me and I haven’t had a word from her since she left here.”
“Perhaps she hurt herself, translocating away in such a hurry,” Shona suggested.
“Barnabas says she got back all right,” said Derk. “Her healer told him she’s as well as can be expected. But I can’t afford to wait much longer, so I shall have to go and disturb her.”
In fact, it was days later that Derk set off to see Querida. The messages Shona had put on his desk kept him and Beauty busy for most of a week. When he finally set off, he was determined that Querida should not set eyes on Beauty. He had seen the way she had looked at Pretty, even in shock and pain, and he was not having her claim Beauty for the University. He left Beauty grazing in a field about five miles away from University City, which was as far as he could translocate himself. He wished he had Blade’s gift for it as he heaved himself onwards.
He got there, just, with a rush and a stagger on landing, at the end of the street of little grey houses where Querida lived, and walked slowly along to the right one. It looked – and felt – completely lifeless. Perhaps Querida had recovered enough by now, he thought, to get herself to the University buildings. Still, he thought he would try the door now he was here. He knocked.
To his surprise, the door moved under his fist and came open. Derk pushed it further ajar. “Is anyone here?”
There was no answer, but there was a faint feeling of life inside.
“Better make sure,” Derk muttered. He walked slowly and cautiously into the house, afraid that someone like Querida would have quite a few nasty traps for intruders, and very conscious of the way the old floor creaked under his boots.
He found himself in a small, busy living room, full of feathers in jars, knicknacks, patterned cushions, patterned shawls, patterned rugs and a lot of twisted snake-shaped candlesticks. It smelt sour and furry and old-ladyish. There was a couch at the far end, all patterns and frills. Querida lay on it, covered with a patterned rug, looking less small than usual because of the smallness of the room. Disposed at comfortable intervals around her were three large tabby cats, who gazed up at Derk with three hostile looks from three pairs of wide yellow eyes. That explains the open door, he thought. The cats have to get in and out. Querida was fast asleep. Her face was white and her mouth open slightly. Her skinny splinted little left arm was laid across her chest, and he could just see it move as she breathed. He could see the outline of splints round her left leg, beside the biggest of the cats.
It seemed a shame to wake her. Derk coughed. “Er – Querida.”
Querida did not move. Derk said her name louder, and then loud enough to cause the cats to twitch their ears crossly, and finally almost in a shout. The cats glared, but it had absolutely no effect on Querida. Derk was alarmed. “I think I’ll get her healer,” he said, feeling a little foolish, not knowing if he was speaking to the cats, to himself or to Querida.
He left the house, with the door carefully not quite shut, and set off towards the University buildings, looking for someone who might know where Querida’s healer lived. Nobody seemed to be about, until he came to the square in front of the University. Here was a considerable crowd, all oddly quiet, patiently waiting around a cart pulled up in the middle, which was loaded with boxes, bundles and rolls of cloth. A tall calm lady, very straight-shouldered and seraphic-looking, was handing the things in the cart out to the waiting people and giving instructions as she did so.
“You’re on the eastern posting,” Derk heard her say as he pushed up closer, “so you’ll need most of febrifuges and herbs for stomach upsets. Here.” She briskly doled out handfuls of little cloth bags and turned to the next group waiting. “Now you people are backing up the tour parties, so make sure you have a baggage mule as well as a horse to ride. I’m going to have to give you remedies for everything under the sun. You wouldn’t believe the things those Pilgrims do to themselves – everything from festering wounds to alcohol poisoning. Here. I call this my body bag.” She turned to pull a sack the size of a bolster out from the cart and her eye fell on Derk. She seemed to know at once that he was not there to collect medicines. “Yes?” she said coldly. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone who knows Querida’s healer,” Derk explained.
“I am Querida’s healer,” the lady said majestically. “Is there a problem?”
“Well, she seems to be asleep—” Derk began.
“Of course she is,” said the majestic lady. “Querida reacts very badly to pain, so I have, at her own request, put her into a healing coma until the pain has gone.”
“Oh,” said Derk. “But I need to speak to her urgently. Is there any chance—?”
“No chance at all,” said the lady. “Come back in—” She passed the bolsterlike bag to the nearest waiting person, nearly choking Derk with the intense whiff of herbs from it, and counted on her fingers. “Come back in a week.”
“A week!” Derk cried out.
“Or ten days,” said the lady.
“But it’s only four days now until the tours start!” Derk protested desperately.
“Precisely,” said the lady. “This is why I am in the middle of outfitting my healers. Now do you mind going away? It is most important that every healer is in place, with the correct remedies, before the first offworlders come through.”
“Yes, yes of course,” Derk found himself saying humbly. She was so majestic that it never even occurred to him to suggest that the Dark Lord might be important too. He backed sadly away to a clear space and tried to translocate to the place where he had left Beauty.
To his disgust, he fell short by nearly two miles. It took him most of the rest of that day to find the field where Beauty was grazing. And he had been relying on Querida’s help. While he searched, he had to keep his mind on the mermaid-daughter in order not to feel sick with worry. She was going to have to have her own pool. It would be quite difficult bringing up a child that had to be kept wet at all times. Mara and he would have to spend a lot of time in the pool with her. They would have to buy a cart in order to take her to the sea …
In spite of this, they arrived home with Beauty bright-eyed and well rested and Derk grey with worry.
“What’s the matter, Dad?” asked Shona.
Derk groaned. “Querida’s going to be asleep for the next ten days. I think she insisted on it. I’d forgotten what she was like. But the trouble is she promised to help me over the god manifesting and raise me a demon. I don’t know what to do!”
“Ask Barnabas?” Lydda suggested, shuffling in with a plate of buttery biscuits.
“He’s busy making camps for the Dark Lord’s army,” Derk said, absently taking four biscuits and not tasting one of them. “That’s quite as urgent. They have to be ready before the Pilgrims come through. They send the soldiers in early.”
“You’d better not try raising demons by yourself,” Shona said anxiously.
“Or gods,” said Lydda. “And Elda wants to know when you can look at the new story she’s written.”
“Tomorrow night,” Derk said. “I think I’ll go and see Umru tomorrow. Perhaps he can persuade his god Anscher to manifest – I told Umru I’d visit him anyway. But what I’m going to do about a demon, I can’t think!”
“Why not ask Mum?” Shona suggested. “She said she’d be in for supper.”
Derk could not see Mara helping him in her present frame of mind, but he said, “Good idea,” in order not to hurt Shona’s feelings. Perhaps if he were very careful speaking to Mara, and particularly careful not to mention the mermaid idea yet …
But Mara arrived late for supper, with two little creases full of her own worries above her pretty nose. She had gone very thin, and her hair had come down to hang in a fat fair plait over one shoulder. “Sorry. I can’t stay long,” she said. “Now Querida’s had herself put to sleep, I have hundreds of things to do for her tomorrow at the latest. I’ll have to get back and start moving people from the village tonight.”
“From the village? Whatever for?” said Derk.
“Didn’t Shona tell you?” Mara asked, and Shona looked down at her plate, not wanting to say that Derk had been too worried for her to want to tell him anything. “Well, you know I never liked the idea of them sitting right in the path of the final confrontation,” Mara said. “You might be careful, Derk, but Pilgrims never are, and the village people could be hurt even in those pits. So I solved the problem by hiring them all as servants to the Enchantress.”
Derk gave her an appalled look. “What with?”
Mara frowned the two little creases tighter yet. “What do you mean, what with?”
Derk swallowed and remembered he was meaning to be very careful and tactful tonight. She’s borrowed a lot of money from someone, he thought. I have to go even more carefully. “Mara,” he said, “you aren’t being paid for being the Enchantress. And I’ve been fined a hundred gold before we even start. We haven’t any money to hire a whole village.”
Mara gave an odd little smile. “Oh, I think I can manage.”
She’s borrowed a massive amount! Derk thought. Dear gods! “Have you hired Fran Taylor and Old George as well? I went to a lot of trouble emaciating them.”
Mara chuckled. “Fran wants to stay picking about in the ruins, but I love Old George! He’s far too good to waste on the village. I want him to be my former lover that I’ve drained to skin and bone. The Pilgrims should be really impressed.”
Derk watched all his plans for a mermaid daughter dwindle into unimportance and then to nothing. His chest hurt. Mara’s going to leave me, he thought. She’s going to leave me for this person she’s borrowed money from. What shall I do? He had always been afraid of this. Wizards’ marriages almost never lasted. Nearly every wizard he knew had one broken marriage, and some had more. That young Finn was on his second marriage; Barnabas’s wife had walked out years ago; even Querida had been married once. Derk miserably supposed he should consider himself lucky that he and Mara had lasted eighteen years.
Mara meanwhile had turned to Shona. “Shona, darling, have you made up your mind yet? I want your help over at Aunt’s house more than ever now, with Querida out of action. I’m going to need lots of silly fashionable clothes – the kind you and Callette are both so good at inventing. What does Callette say?”
“Callette’s on her hundred and nineteenth gizmo,” Shona said. “She’ll need another day at least to do the rest. She says she might come over then. But—” She shot a look at the brooding Derk. “Mum, I don’t think I can come. There’d be no one but Lydda to look after things here.”
“I’ve said I can manage,” Lydda said with her beak full.
“I can help here too,” Elda muttered into a pile of fruit. “Everyone thinks I’m too small.”
“Not so much small as young,” Mara told Elda. “You are only ten, love, and I want you to come over to me with Callette. And why should Lydda do everything here? What’s wrong with you, Don, or you, Blade?”
Don sat with a raw chop halfway to his beak, Blade sat with a cooked one on the end of his fork. They exchanged looks of panic and consternation.
“Or Kit?” added Mara.
“May I consider?” Shona asked rather hectically. “Perhaps I’ll come when Callette’s finished – and there isn’t a piano in Aunt’s house, is there?”
“Yes there is,” said Mara. She got up. “That’s settled then. I’ll expect you and Callette and Elda the day after tomorrow. You’re going to love my pink embroidered hangings!”
Breaking up the family too, Derk thought miserably as Mara rushed away.
Blade, fairly naturally, tried to rush away too as soon as supper was over. But Shona deftly seized him by one arm and dragged him through to the kitchen, where Elda was swilling plates with careless abandon.
“Blade, you really have to help me do something!” Shona whispered. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“Noticed what?” Blade asked.
“Mum and Dad. They’re terminally not getting on.”
“They’re always quarrelling. You worry too much,” Elda said, shoving three wet plates into the rack.
“Wash those again,” Shona said automatically. “No, that’s just the trouble – they’re not quarrelling. Dad should have exploded just now about the money, and he hardly said a word.”
Blade sighed, knowing that his carefree time was over. “I see what you mean.”
“Bhrright!” Beauty remarked as she wheeled down towards the main courtyard.
“It surely is,” Derk agreed. “Umru has to find something to do with his money.” He sighed as Beauty descended. He had been trying hard not to think of money, or of how much Mara might have borrowed, or of the mermaid daughter they would never have now. Not thinking of these things left a cold emptiness somewhere in the middle of his mind. I must think of an entirely different creature, he told himself as Beauty’s hooves touched the ground.
Willing, fanatical-looking men rushed to look after Beauty. More of them rushed to conduct Derk to the presence of Umru. He was handed over to a covey of acolytes, who handed him to priests, who handed him in turn to more priests, who led him through long upstairs cloisters painted with gold leaf to where Umru was waiting, smiling, in an empty sun-filled room.
“You could have landed on my balcony, if I had known your horse had wings,” Umru said to him. “Come. Sit.” He led Derk to a couple of throne-like chairs.
This room was only empty after a fashion, Derk thought, settling among carved cedarwood and gold. The floor was a pattern of blocks of wood, variously scented and coloured. Astoundingly beautiful silk rugs lay here and there upon it. The ceiling was a masterpiece of marble carved to resemble a tree in bloom, and the many narrow window frames were like trees too, with fruit. In between, the walls were inlaid with more masterpieces in coloured stone. But it was still an austere room, fit for a priest. Umru was a funny mixture, Derk thought. His vestments looked simple, but the cost of them would buy Derkholm several times over. Derk suddenly noticed that his own boots had not been cleaned after milking. And one of his cuffs was fraying.
“I’ve come to ask you to help me,” he said, tucking the offensive cuff under and doubling his feet back until the boots were under the sumptuous chair.
“And you can help me, my friend,” said Umru. “As you must have seen from your black book and your maps and lists, the battles are scheduled to take place this year just beyond this city of mine, all over my fields and farms – all over this land that I have worked so hard to make prosper. What am I to do?”
“I’m not sure there’s anything you can do,” Derk said.
“One battle a week for the next three months,” Umru added. “Everything will be trampled to mud by next spring.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that,” Derk said, “but I am good at making things grow. I’ll come back when the tours are over and make sure you have some crops at least.”
“Penury and disaster will ensue,” said Umru. “No seeds will be sown—”
“Oh no, it won’t be that bad,” Derk assured him. “If you tell the people to plant seeds anyway, I’ll make as many grow as I can.”
“My people too will be trampled underfoot, the women raped, the infants slain. There will be no one to sow the seeds,” Umru proclaimed.
“But,” Derk objected, “you must have hundreds of cellars and crypts for people to hide in!”
Umru sighed. “My friend,” he said, in a noticeably more normal manner, “I think you are not following my drift. If the Dark Lord wishes, he can surely oblige a friend by moving the battles a few miles – say, twenty miles, bringing the site south of the mountains that border my country.”
“Not easily,” Derk hastened to explain. “You see the routes have been very carefully interlocked to bring several tours to the same battle—”
Umru sighed again. “How much?”
“Eh?” Derk found his fingers fiddling with the frayed ends of his cuff. He let go quickly. “If you’re saying what I think you are, then the answer’s—” He stopped short. Money would be very welcome, money to pay that fine, money to cover the huge sum Mara had to have borrowed in order to pay everyone in the village. On the other hand, he needed a god, or no one would get any money at all. And he needed Umru’s help for that. “I don’t take bribes,” he said.
Umru’s face dropped forward on to his stack of double chins. He looked so thoroughly depressed that Derk added, “But, as I was going to say, I’ll see if I can shift the battles south for nothing. It won’t be easy, because they’ve got everyone converging on you this year – you’re supposed to hold the final clue to my weakness – and Barnabas is setting up the main camp for me. I’ll have to give him the wrong map reference, tell him I made a mistake or something. But I’ll do what I can.”
Umru raised his face from his chins and looked deeply at Derk. “You’re an honest man.”
“Well, not—” Derk shifted in his carved chair until it creaked.
“And I admire you for it. With sadness,” Umru said. “I really do have a great deal of money. You needn’t do it for nothing.”
“I will. I’ve said I’ll try,” Derk protested. “After all, I may not be able to do it.”
“Very honest,” sighed Umru. “So. You said I could help you. How?”
With an uneasy feeling that Umru might have been readier to help him if he had accepted a bribe, Derk leant forward in the carved chair and explained about Mr Chesney’s idea for a novelty. And it was worse than Derk had expected. As soon as he mentioned Anscher, Umru’s head tilted back and his mouth became a fat, grim line. His large face became more and more stony, the longer Derk talked. “It was in the contract, you see,” Derk explained. “I know the contract was drawn up when both of us were only children, but Mr Chesney regards it as binding. None of us gets any money this year if we don’t get a god to manifest.”
“Not even for money,” Umru said, very upright in his chair. “It is odd how every man has his sticking-point, Wizard Derk. You have told me yours. You have just met mine. I have done many things for Mr Chesney, for money, but this is one thing I will not, cannot do. We do not command the gods. They command us. Any attempt to coerce the gods is vile.”
This man is truly a devout priest after all! Derk thought. He was completely sure Umru meant what he said. “I see. I accept that,” he said hastily. “But perhaps you could give me a hint about some way I could fake—”
“You don’t see at all, wizard,” Umru interrupted, “or you would not ask. No one who has known a god could even speak of faking. Let me tell you. I was not always as you see me now. I was once a slender young boy, the youngest in my family, and my family was not rich. We lived by the mountains, a long way south of this city. My father had a few cows, some goats and a flock of geese. I was only entrusted with the geese. If I lost those geese, you see, the family would not starve, and I was considered too young to watch the animals. And one day I drove my geese out to feed on a certain swelling green hill. I was sitting there as carelessly as you sit in that chair now, thinking of nothing much, rather bored, but with no ambition in the world except perhaps to guard the cows for once, when Anscher appeared to me. As close as I am to you, wizard, Anscher stood before me. And he was a god, wizard. There was absolutely no doubting it, though it is not a thing I can describe. He smiled at me. He never even asked my name. He never asked me to do anything for him. He just stood in front of me and said, ‘I am Anscher, your god,’ and he smiled.”
Umru stared out into the empty room. Derk could see tears in his eyes.
“The glory of that appearance,” Umru said after a moment, “has been with me every moment of every day, of every year of my priesthood, through everything I have done. I have always hoped he would appear again, but he never has, wizard. He never has. When I first became High Priest and started to raise Anscher above other gods, I made that hill where I saw him into a sanctuary to him. I had an altar set up there. Now I think that was presumptuous. By doing that, I tried to command Anscher to appear to me again, and that was wrong. He will not come to me again now. I am too proud, too old, too fat. No, he will not come.”
Umru’s voice faded away and he sat staring, with tears running down his great cheeks. Derk watched uncomfortably. He sat and watched and Umru sat and stared for so long that Derk began to wonder whether he should simply get up and tiptoe away. But Umru suddenly smiled, wiped the tears off with the sleeve of his expensive gown and said, “You know, I think it’s lunchtime. Will you join me in some lunch, Wizard?”
Derk was thoroughly unnerved. “I – I’d be honoured,” he managed to say.
Umru clapped his chubby hands. Instantly a group of young boys, who had obviously been waiting outside for the signal, came hurrying in with a folding table, beakers, jugs, plates and trays of food. The trays were probably gold. The glassware was exquisite crystal. The food smelt wonderful. Derk had forgotten that the worshippers of Anscher never ate meat, but the various dishes were so beautifully cooked that he hardly noticed they were all made of vegetables. He slipped a particularly fine pasty into his pocket to show Lydda. And when the boys raced in again with bowls heaped with fruit, Derk wanted to take the strangest sort for Elda, but he did not quite like to, not after the pasty.
“Try one of these, Wizard,” Umru said. “You won’t have met this fruit before. I bought them off one of Mr Chesney’s tour agents – we often do little deals on the side, you know. She called them oranges, I believe.”
“They are,” said Derk. “Orange, I mean.”
Umru laughed. “You peel the outside off,” he explained. “Like this. Then the inside splits into pieces, just as if one of their gods had designed them for people to eat. Remarkable, aren’t they?”
“Mm.” Derk was not sure he liked the sharp, definite taste, but he was sure Elda would.
“Take another home with you,” Umru said generously. “I have two dozen. I only paid four gold for them, too.” While Derk weighed the orange globe in his hand, thinking the thing was rather like one of Callete’s early gizmos, Umru added, “They have pips. The young woman told me that they grow well in warm, dry conditions. I think they grow like apples, on trees.”