Nobody’s Son

  Lissa studied her immaculate blue tail-coat, still unstained. “Gail has always been an ardent camper. When the weather warmed we used to sleep outside, in the Palace gardens,” she continued softly. “We pitched our tent behind the Laughing Fountain. There was a big magnolia there; on summer nights the blossoms glowed with moonlight; the breeze would make them sway like lanterns held by dancing angels.” Lissa sat down then, folding her legs beneath her. Sunset licked red flame onto the western clouds. “We stayed up late, of course, and went sneaking through the garden in the dark. Three times we found coy Teris with her lovers. Gail would snarl and snuffle like a wild thing, trying to scare them. Once from behind a shrub she reached and nipped one on the ankle. Half fox she was back then, and the other half less girl than goblin…”

  “And nowt’s changed since.” Mark squatted beside her with his chin on his knee. A flock of startled birds rose from the river valley and hung, circling, in the twilight sky. “You remember a lot of things.”

  Lissa nodded. “Many things. And ever more, of late. Remember what the woman said, our hostess at the Ram? Dreams…Strange dreams.” There was something new in Lissa’s quiet voice now, something like fear. “I may yet believe in magic,” she said, trying to smile. “I saw the ghost, Mark. At the High Holt. I saw him.”

  “What! Did you tell Richard?”

  Lissa shook her head. “It was late on our first night. There was something in the air; the wind; and something bedded too in all that dreadful stone. I was frightened, too frightened to sleep.”

  Mark stared at Lissa in surprise. “You! I thought you used to scare Gail half to death wi’ stories.”

  “I paid a higher price for them than she. She ran to Mother’s bed and fell asleep: I always stayed behind, and stayed awake. Gail enjoys being scared; to her it is exciting, like wind or wine.” Lissa shook her head and shuddered. “I am frightened all the time, and I hate it, Shielder’s Mark. I hate it.

  “But enough of this. I could not sleep. Sometime after midnight I rose and wandered to my window. Then I saw him.

  “When Janey told us of the High Holt’s ghost, I conjured up a sentry in my mind, pacing his damned watch across the battlements and back, pike resting on his shoulder, dripping supernatural gore; an arrow, perhaps, transfixing his breast, its shaft jerking with each step and breath and heartbeat.”

  She swallowed. “The real ghost was different. He was an old man, a terrible old man. He turned around, as if he felt me watching him, and looked at me with such hate. His eyes! Those eyes were cold and hard as iron. They had known such horrible things. Had seen horrors done on his command.”

  Softly, Mark asked, “You’re sure it wasn’t a real person?”

  “There was something wrong about him, Mark. Wrong that he should be there; I half believed the Ghost King walked again. O God, there was a richness to that terrible man. As music is to talking was he to the world. As red wine is to water.

  “And…and I saw myself dying in his eyes, Mark. I saw myself with a lump in my throat as big as an egg and I was withered and in pain, dying in a splendid room, alone. Dying alone…” She faltered, staring at the ground. “You cannot believe me, can you?”

  Mark grunted. “I’ve been to a place where the same day happened for a thousand years, and I’ve hefted a singing sword. I carry a scar on my hand that hurts worse the farther west I go. I’ll not call the kettle black. Even Gail’s had witchy dreams. Does she know you saw the Ghost?”

  Lissa shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “It is difficult, sometimes, believing anything can matter that happens to me, and not to her. Besides,” Lissa said with a smile, “are you not the hero, Shielder’s Mark? You must be the expert when it comes to breaking spells.”

  “Hunh! Then we’re knee-deep in the pig-shite for sure.” Dark was falling around them. “Hope they bring back firewood,” Mark muttered. What had Jervis said, about old men’s magic? Was there such a thing once?

  Old men. An old man on the battlement with death in his iron eyes.

  And another at the Red Keep, who sat before his fire and stared at some dreadful mystery, drawing in the ashes.

  It was full dark by the time Gail and Valerian trudged back empty-handed. “Tragically, there was no game to be found,” Val said, grinning with relief.

  “Nor firewood neither, eh?”

  “Oops! Sorry.”

  Mark spat, considering a cold night in the tent.

  Gail shook her head in frustration. “It was the queerest thing! I used to hunt around the castle all the time. But you know, we barely saw a damn thing all the time we were out there! It’s…harder than I thought,” she said with a frown.

  Ten men! Mark fought to keep from laughing. “Bad luck!” He glanced at Lissa, sitting beside their large oil lamp. She met his gaze with her usual polished polite smile, but he thought he caught a gleam of merriment in her eye. And just this once, the joke wasn’t on him.

  The river had cut three broad steps into the plain on its eastern side, each perhaps two hundred paces wide. Borders, or what remained of it, sat on the lowest terrace. An arch of stone, still standing by a miracle, faced east toward the road, marking where the main gate must have been. When they reached it, Mark sent Val and Lissa to deal with the King’s architect, who awaited them in a tent encampment just upriver from the Keep; this allowed him and Gail to walk through Borders alone. “Buy me a little time to look ower my new home,” he said. “I want to know what it feels like here, before I go changing it.”

  Borders was a crumbled ruin, its grey bones cancered with moss and ivy. Mark and Gail walked down corridors now open to the sky. Nowt left here of folk or life. Time has cracked the stone walls open and the spirit’s fled, Mark thought, sombre. A dead body wi’ soul gone.

  A hundred paces farther on came the riverbank itself, a willow-lined bank six feet high. There the first span of a shattered stone bridge hung above the water. This must be the one Aron broke behind him when he penned the Ghost King in the Wood, Mark mused. A lot of mystery in those crumbled stones.

  They had come in the late afternoon. Here the river was shallow and rocky. The Border chattered with cold; splinters of sunlight broke like ice on its back and went whirling downstream.

  The far bank was a steep, sandy bluff, pitted with small caves that housed otters, minks, stoats: maybe a fox and a badger or two. Streams cut the cliff-side, running swiftly to the river. The bluff was crowned with darkness: the Ghostwood, a dark cloud of cedar, fir and pine. This Wood, cupped in a circle of hills that started north of the High Holt and did not come down to the Border’s edge again for a hundred miles, formed the great bulk of Mark’s territory.

  Great. Duke of a haunted wood. Well, you’ll find summat to use it for.

  The thin strip of land allowed him on the Border’s eastern side, seventy miles long and never more than five miles wide, formed the useful part of his duchy: land so far west of anything, Astin could grant it to him without offending his neighbours in High Holt and Fenwold.

  Mark stepped cautiously on the bridge. It held. He stood a long time there, with one foot on that broken span, while a melancholy filled him, sweet and sad and grieving. Once he had felt like a machine, driven toward his destiny. But in the Ghostwood, part of the machine had broken, some chain around his heart. Now he felt loose as cloud inside; changing shape with every wind of feeling. He wondered if he were about to cry.

  What the hell? You never wept, before the Ghostwood got you. A shadow slipped into you there, lad: you’ve gone weak and funny inside.

  And yet it felt…it felt almost good. I’m alive, he thought, remembering the rush of feeling, standing next to Gail in the dark, or lying in the Ram, hearing his mother’s lullaby. I’m alive at last. And I’ve been dead so long.

  Things go so far, and no further. A boy grows up, but doesn’t become a man; the men grow old, but they can’t find their wisdom.

  A man gets married but can’t even come into his
wife’s bed. They live together for a while, then one day the love is gone. The husband leaves, leaves his wife and child behind. What’s begun is never finished: and the man that starts across this bridge will never reach t’other side.

  Come into his own at last, with the rush of the river in his ears and his heart, Mark knew then that he needed, that he must have a son.

  He had to have a son.

  “The workmen will be wondering where we are,” Gail said gently. “Lissa and Val won’t satisfy them long. They want to see the Duke.”

  “And the Princess.”

  Gail shook her head. “I was a princess in another life. While I am here, I am the Duchess first. Well, Gail first,” she said with a grin. “Then the Duchess, and the Princess last of all. But now Gail and Mark have had a chance to see their playground: it’s time for the Duke and Duchess to get to work.”

  Mark held up his hands. “All right, all right! I surrender!” He settled his clumsy leather hat more firmly on his head and strode back for the Keep.

  His Keep.

  A copse of chestnut trees stood south of the ruins, their smooth, blossom-coated branches reaching out like fingers gloved in lace. “That must have been the orchard,” Mark guessed. “Like the cherry trees at High Holt and the Red Keep.”

  “Or the apple trees at Jervis’ Pension,” Gail said.

  Beyond this grove the workmen had burned a clearing out of the brush and brambles. They stood before a fleet of canvas tents, chatting together and staring curiously at Mark and Gail. Before them, Valerian and Lissa were listening to a small, thin, superior man who clutched a sheaf of drawings.

  Lissa, seeing Gail and Mark approach, turned with eyes downcast and gave her most deferential bow. Mark was about to bow back when Gail dug her strong fingers into his forearm. He settled for a gracious inclination of his head.

  Valerian bowed. “Er, um, Master Orrin, architect in chief to his Majesty,” he mumbled, indicating the dapper man with the drawings.

  “Very good,” Mark said. “Um, so, Master Orrin. How does your honoured father?”

  “Ooh! Fine, fine! Tip top!” From the way the man coloured and fussed with his sketches and glanced at his feet, Mark guessed that he’d let slip a sign of great favour. Gail’s hand quivered on his arm. Trying not to laugh, the minx.

  “Well then, Orrin, how goes the work?”

  “Of course we haven’t been here long, your Lordship, and many of the masons haven’t yet arrived, but even so I have been able to get a feeling from the land, a feeling for the possibilities, and I have some ideas I really think you’ll find intriguing.

  “Just here, behind the tents, I see something really nice. Something light, something airy: with that southern face we should get lots of sun, and any stinginess of Nature we can rectify with windows, if they be but broad and deep enough. Oak and marble, don’t you think? For that stately, classic feel: a little paradise set in a wooded river valley. Rustically charming!” Looking up from his sketches, his eyes fell on Valerian’s emerald ring, and Lissa’s fashionable swallow-tailed coat. “Yet, sophisticated!”

  “This looks nice,” Mark said, studying Master Orrin’s drawings. “Very neat. I can see you’re good at your job, Master Orrin, and we’ll build this someday. But I want Borders just as it were five hundred years ago.”

  Master Orrin’s jaw dropped. “But, but…but your Lordship! That is impossible! No one can tell what the old place looked like!…Besides,” he wheedled, “between you and me, those old keeps were nasty places. Have you seen the High Holt? Dark. Damp. Dusty. Full of bats. Bats, your Lordship! You can’t want bats in your Ladyship’s hair.”

  Gail squashed a snigger down into a sneeze.

  Mark clasped the architect’s shoulder. “Harder to bring t’awd place back than press wine from cherry stones, Orrin. I know it. That’s why you’re t’only man for the job. But we can’t just cart the stones away and blot Borders from the earth. We’re by the Ghostwood here; the past must have its say.” Mark knew this heartwise. Nobody’s Son needed roots, and the roots of Borders dug deep.

  “But your Lordship! Half the walls have fallen, nor can we trust the ones still left. To do what you require we would be forced to tear them down and build again on the selfsame spot!”

  Mark clapped him on the shoulder. “Good thinking, Orrin. I knew you were the right man for the job.”

  Val blinked, eyes shining with enthusiasm. “Think of it! A chance to delve into the past, to crawl into a builder’s mind now fifty generations dust. Any architect can make buildings from his fancy, Master Orrin: but you will be producing something quite unique, a manor that the fickle wind of fashion never can erode. No lesser task than resurrection has the Duke of Borders given you, to give life not to corpses, but to the grave itself.”

  “And you’ll get your fair free hand,” Mark promised. “Too much is lost for you to lean on simple imitation. You’ll have to crawl into t’awd builder’s head like a mouse into a wine bottle.”

  “Oh, really,” Orrin said. A flicker of hope came to his eyes and he glanced beseechingly at Gail. “Your Highness—”

  “The Duke is master of his house,” Gail said briskly. “Your business is to indulge his whims, however mad.”

  The architect’s shoulders sagged. He looked back through the ragged rows of chestnut trees. “We could start on the Great Hall first,” he mumbled. “Once that’s done we can move inside. Kitchens too, of course, to feed the lads…” His eyes narrowed, flicking down to the broken bridge, up the river valley to where the road would run, along the skyline. “Would have grown up around the ford, I suppose. Not really defensible; from what’s left of the walls I should guess they didn’t try.”

  “Not such a fortress as the High Holt,” Valerian murmured.

  Orrin shook his head. “No, not at all. The chestnuts, now…shade, of course, in the summer. Which means there were probably gardens outside the south wall: a lawn at least, for walking or playing. That runs the road back behind the north wall and down to the bridge…” He fumbled for a piece of charcoal and flipped over one of his drawings to begin sketching on the back.

  Gail grinned quickly at Mark.

  Master Orrin was rapidly forgetting that the Duke existed. Suddenly his fingers stopped. “Wind!” he cried, starting to draw again more feverishly. “That’s the second reason for the trees: the valley must funnel the wind down from the south. That’s why chestnuts instead of apple trees or cherries,” he said, blinking as if surprised to find Mark still there. “Taller, stronger, with broader leaves. Shade from the south sun if you need it, and a windbreak too. Which must mean that the first builder didn’t want the place to be damp and drafty, of course! What good builder would? What could I have been thinking?” he cried, and forgetting to take his leave of the Duke, he hurried over to his foreman.

  “If you do not need me lord, I would like to follow him,” Valerian said. “Your challenge excites my imagination; and too, I have always had the strongest fascination for the art of landscaping. It’s a, a—”

  “A hobby of yours?” Lissa enquired, one eyebrow raised.

  “Well, it is,” Val said defensively; and with a quick bow he hurried over to Orrin before he missed any more of the plans.

  The next few weeks passed by in a whirl of activity. Mark and Gail stunned Orrin and his men by joining in the work: scrambling over fallen walls, digging for old foundation lines, even hauling stones. Mark’s body fell into the comfortable rhythm of hard work it expected as April dried into May and May warmed into June. Spring waxed slowly into summer, and Gail hopped around the Keep like a goblin, getting ever browner and stronger, loving every day she spent outside. Valerian was ecstatic, and spent countless hours doodling visions of what Borders might have been.

  The idea of the Old Borders began to exert a weird hold on everyone, not just Mark. Orrin’s masons marvelled at how well the old blocks had been cut, and how cleverly they had been joined, particularly in the making of arches, like t
hat at the Main Gate. Orrin’s carpenter looked longingly at the stands of cedar across the river, his hand itching on his adze. Even the cook, as it turned out, had a passion for chestnuts; he could hardly wait for the fall crop.

  As for Orrin, the architect was a man possessed. He had spent his working life in the flatlands, building elegant mansions for clients who craved light and space and air. These were good things, and he did not mean to abandon them. Clearly much at Borders had been made from cedar timber, a wood he knew well and for which he felt great affection.

  But here at Borders Master Orrin fell in love with stone. Its solidity. Its permanence. Its substance, as he said many times each day, running his hand along a smooth granite block. “You think of it as dull, until you look! Then you see white and grey and flecks of red smouldering within the rock. Leave it rough on the outer walls, of course. But imagine it polished, facing into a room with broad windows and a high ceiling! And so little risk of fire!” And so on.

  As workmen pieced the old stones together, so Orrin and Valerian laboured to reconstruct the mind that had built Borders in the first place. They called him the Maker, and admired him beyond reason: his deep knowledge, his keen vision, his profound wisdom. Whenever Orrin would suggest, for example, some way in which the west window of the Great Hall must have been positioned so as to catch perfectly the afternoon light, then he and Val would stare at one another, and shake their heads, and express their amazement at the way the Maker thought of everything.

  “Of course he was a genius,” Lissa observed to Mark one day as they watched Val and Orrin at work. “The Maker never can look dull, when he is given credit for all of Orrin’s shrewdest thoughts, and all Valerian’s insight!”

  Lissa too was busy, though Mark wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing.

  Finally, one day at the beginning of June, she approached Gail and Mark as they watched the doorway of the Great Hall go up. “My lord—”

  “Mark!”

  Lissa curtsied. “Ahem. Mark, you told me once that when I spoke to you as servant I was to make my speaking plain. Very well: bear with my attempt.