The Prince in Waiting

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:

“I thought I had lost you, Luke.”

“I could not sleep in there.”

I would not speak of the rats, and my fear, to him. He said:

“Tonight you will sleep in a bed.”

I nodded. “I will be glad of it, sire.”

But I was not glad when, at the end of the afternoon, he pointed and I saw the Stones of the Sanctuary ahead of us. They stood like jagged teeth on the skyline; tiny but, being miles away still, having the promise of enormity. The promise or the threat. I had made this journey as a duty to my father’s memory, not thinking of its end. There had been vague thoughts of the High Seers, of Seances, but nothing concrete, nothing, really, that meant anything. Those distant pillars were real, and foreboding. They were surrounded by empty downland, cropped only by rabbits. No man would go near, no shepherd graze his flocks in their shadow. It was the place of the High Seers, dread and holy, and that dread touched me, making me want to turn back toward the world of men. I would rather have taken my chance with Peter and his Captains than go forward. But I had come so far that I must go on to the end. And again I would not show my fear to Ezzard.

It was a long walk toward them. The sun, sinking, had come out from behind clouds and cast shadows from the Stones that stretched tenuous fingers in our direction. I could see them more clearly. They roughly formed a circle, great jagged-hewn wedges many times the height of a man and broad in proportion. They were set apart from each other but some were linked by other immense stones resting on top and between them.

Inside there was nothing but the rabbit-cropped grass. I felt a new and different alarm. Could this emptiness be the Sanctuary? I had expected a huge building, a castle perhaps. Where did the High Seers live? There was only grass and the great time-weathered stones. Did one walk through a doorway in one, into the Spirits’ world? Or climb an invisible ladder to a stronghold in the clouds?

We crossed a shallow ditch and the stones loomed over us. We passed between two of them, scored by the wind and rain not of years, it seemed, but centuries. Within the outer ring were other stones, some standing and some fallen. Near the center, beside one of these, was a sort of mushroom, made of stone but whiter and less pitted than the bigger ones. It was only a few feet high. Ezzard went to it and put his hand underneath, feeling for something. I stood beside him, telling my limbs not to tremble. We waited in silence, for half a minute perhaps. And then the stone mushroom spoke:

“Who comes?”

The Seer bent his head toward the mushroom.

“Ezzard, with the Prince in Waiting.”

I do not know what I expected to happen: thunder and lighting, perhaps, a chariot of fire appearing out of the sky, a solid rainbow leading to a magic land. Instead there was a creaking sound and the ground on the other side of the mushroom moved, splitting and opening. There was not darkness revealed but light, a whiter, brighter light than I had ever seen, the steps leading down.

Ezzard said: “Come, Luke.”

I hesitated. They were ordinary steps but they terrified me. And the light . . . the light of the Spirits? I remembered all the events they had set in motion. Maybe they had helped me to win the jeweled sword and my father to the Princedom. But after that . . . my mother slain, my aunt executed for her murder, my father’s head set up above the East Gate, a thing to be mocked. And I myself driven from the city disguised as a polymuf. The good they had done me was surely outweighed by the evil.

All this was true. What was also true was that at last I faced their stronghold. They could do no more than take my life. It was little enough worth living as it was; if I broke and ran it was worth nothing. I went in front of Ezzard into the hole.

A dozen steps below there was a platform where the staircase turned on itself before descending even farther into the bowels of the earth. Behind me Ezzard stopped and I stopped also. He touched a button set in the wall. There was a whirring sound, followed by the creaking I had heard on the surface, and I saw the gap closing above us, blotting out the sky. I realized then that underneath grass and earth there was metal and this was rising, a trapdoor to seal the opening at the top of the stairs. I was less alarmed than confused, my mind trying to take in what could not be denied and yet was impossible. The light, I saw, came from long tubes of glass. Ezzard touched another button and more of them flashed into radiance, lighting the stairs below.

“Ezzard!” I cried. “These lights . . .”

He looked at me. I could scarcely bring myself to say it, but it was not possible to be silent.

“They are not the lights of the Spirits . . . and the trap door, that is not the work of Spirits either. These are machines!”

“Yes,” he said. “I told you there would be strange things to learn.”

• • •

I sat at supper with Ezzard and the High Seers. They wore no cloaks but simple clothes—trousers and shirt—as Ezzard did also; and except for Ezzard their heads were not cropped but carried a normal covering of hair. On the senior of the three, who had come to Winchester, it was sparse and white with age but the big one had a heavy thatch of black. And he did not, I noticed, eat with the sparrowlike delicacy he had shown at my father’s banquet but heartily, as a man who enjoys his food. Like the shaved heads and the cloaks, that had been done for show.

It was strange, too, to hear them speak in easy, unmeasured voices—to speak and even laugh. They were ordinary men, and relief and disappointment were at war in me, realizing this. I was silent, putting no questions and answering briefly the questions put to me. There were not many of these: I guessed they were letting me get used to things by degrees, accustom my mind gradually to its shock. I learned their names: the little white-haired man was called Lanark, the big dark one Murphy.

When supper was over each took his own plate to the kitchen where they were stacked in a machine that washed them: one could hear the rush of water behind the closed door. There seemed to be no servants—I supposed because there were no polymufs. One of the men operated another machine that moved across the floor with a whining sound, sucking crumbs and dust into itself. The others led the way into a large room with many chairs and couches. The walls had been painted with scenes of landscape framed by pillars—a forest glade, a garden, a view of rocks and sea, and on the fourth the streets of a city, with men and women, children, a dog scratching itself in the dust. They were reminders to men who lived like moles underground of what the world was like.

We took seats. Lanark said:

“Now, Luke, what would you like to know?”

There were so many things that it was hard to think of one. I said after a moment:

“The machines—what makes them go?”

“Electricity.”

“What is that?”

“A force. It is hard to explain. Something which is invisible but which can be used.”

“Invisible? Like the Spirits?”

He smiled. “No.”

I said, with daring: “Do the Spirits exist?”

I still half expected to be condemned for blasphemy. But Lanark said:

“If they do they have not shown themselves to us.”

“The Seances . . . the lights and sounds . . .”

“Are trickery, to keep the power of the Seers over men’s minds.”

“The prophecies . . .”

“Prophecies often fulfill themselves because expectation brings its own results. Where they fail”—he shrugged—“they can usually be explained away.”

I shook my head. My mind was fuzzed with doubts and uncertainty. I said:

“I don’t understand.”

Lanark said: “I know it isn’t easy. Best, perhaps, to take things from the beginning. You know what is said of the Disaster?”

“That our ancestors were given powers by Spirits who led them on and then, in the end, destroyed them, casting down their cities and making the earth itself spew flame.”

“It has some truth in it. Our ancestors did have great powers, they built cities in which a thousand Winchesters could be dropped and lost, they had machines in which they could fly through the air—around the world in less than a day—or see things as they happened thousands of miles away. They traveled to the distant moon. Then came the Disaster.

“The strange thing was that many men had expected it, though not in the form in which it happened. Because among the machines were machines of war: by pressing a button a man could destroy from half a world away a city so large that Winchester by comparison is but a hamlet. It was thought that sooner or later these powers of destruction would be unleashed and the world driven back to barbarism if it were not destroyed entirely. Men feared this possibility. Later the anticipation was confused with the reality.”

I asked: “What did happen?”

“The earth itself rebelled. Except that that is a wrong way of putting it: the earth is inanimate, without will or mind. But it has life, of a sort. It can change, and change violently. Men knew that in the past, the incredibly distant past before man himself existed, there had been convulsions of the earth in which vast lands were crumpled like parchment, mountains thrust into the sky, volcanoes belched fire and molten rock. There were still a few volcanoes, now and then an earthquake. Occasionally a town was shattered, a few hundred people killed. These were freaks of nature, unexpected, soon forgotten.

“Then the earth’s fires, smoldering for a thousand million years, broke loose again. We do not know why. Some think it was to do with the sun, which just before showed puzzling signs—strange bursts of radiation accompanied by dark spots across its face. At any rate, the earth shook and heaved and everywhere men’s cities tumbled and men died in their ruins. The worst of it did not last long, days rather than weeks, but it was enough to destroy the world of cities and machines. Those who survived roamed the shattered countryside and fought one another for what food there was.

“Gradually they came together again. They built houses to protect them from the weather—of wood, not stone, and designed as far as possible to withstand the earthquakes which still continued, though more and more rarely. They returned to their old places, at least to the villages and the small cities. Not to the large ones which were left as rubble. They did as they had done in the past—grew crops, raised cattle, traded and practiced crafts and fought. But they would have no truck with machines, identifying them with their forefathers’ ancient pride and the reckoning which had followed. Anyone found dabbling with machines was killed, for fear of bringing down fresh destruction.

“They had many religions in the old days. One was concerned with what were supposed to be the Spirits of the dead and this now spread like wildfire. Seance Halls were built and in them, in the dark, the Spirits were supposed to talk to men, to guide and counsel them.

“But there were a few men, a handful, who were not content with this, who knew that machines were not evil in themselves and in fact could help us back to civilization. They dared not defy the legends—those who did were torn to pieces by the mob—but they could use them. They became Seers and took over the Seance Halls. They preached anathema to machines but preserved the knowledge of them, all the time looking for likely recruits.”

“Martin . . .,” I said.

“Yes, such as Martin. And at certain places, called Sanctuaries and so holy that no one would come near them, they built machines and worked with them. Here, and elsewhere. Do you understand now?”

“Partly,” I said. “But not why I was brought here. To work with the machines?”

Lanark smiled. “We would sooner have brought Martin. For you we have different plans, very different. Do you remember what I told you when we met in Winchester?”

“That the Spirits had a mission for me to perform.”

“There are no Spirits, that we know of, but there is a mission. I said that men recovered from the Disaster but only some men, in a few favored places. These lands are one such. Outside there are deserts and desolation, and monstrous beasts. There are also savages. They multiply fast and hunger drives them against the civilized lands. The winters have grown longer and harder because the sun’s rays are weakened by dust thrown into the sky by the volcanoes. The cities themselves are beginning to feel the pinch, with farmers growing poorer crops and raising fewer beasts. Four years ago Taunton fell. Dorchester was besieged all last summer and the barbarians are at the walls again. And when a city falls to those enemies there are no ransoms—only plunder and murder, followed by fire and ruin.

“We have spoken with men in far parts of the world who share our aim of restoring civilization. Not through the pigeons; we have machines that can do this as our ancestors did. At one time there were many voices, but they grew fewer. For a year we have had no answer to our calls.

“Men’s loyalties were narrowed by the Disaster. The cities, when they were rebuilt, warred fiercely against one another, each remaining sovereign and separate, violently hostile to the rest. There have been similar times in man’s history. But the only hope of resisting the savages is for the cities to join together; individually they have no hope.”

I said: “So when Ezzard told my father the Spirits wished him to keep Petersfield, against all custom . . .”

“It was part of the plan. There had to be one city that would dominate and unite the others. Winchester was best for this. It is well placed, at the center of the civilized lands, and rich; and there is a memory in men’s minds that once, hundreds of years ago, a great Prince ruled from there.

“But having chosen the city we needed a Prince. Stephen was no good to us, a timid, unambitious man. His son, Edmund, might have served. If there had not been someone better we should have had to use him. But Ezzard found you and when, against great odds, you won the prize at the Contest, our choice was made certain.”

“But it was only by accident that I was in the Contest at all! If Matthew had not fallen ill with a fever . . .”

“No accident,” Lanark said. “It takes no great art to raise a fever.”

I remembered meeting Ezzard in the High Street and how he had told me to make the most of my skating since it might be my last winter for it. I said:

“And everything after that . . . my father becoming Prince, the two crowns of light at the Seance . . . all these were contrived?”

“Your father’s election needed skill. The crowns of light were a simple trick.”

“But the machine that burst and burst the walls of Petersfield—you could not have known that would happen!”

Lanark smiled. “Could we not? When one understands something of gunpowder it is not too difficult to make a cannon blow up. The Seer of Petersfield saw to it.”

Disbelief still lingered; and disappointment. I had thought I accepted the loss of a destiny predicted by the Spirits, but a part of me still balked. I said:

“At the Seance of the Crowns . . . there was a farmer who complained that he had paid gold to the Seer to protect his lambs but lost them all the same. And the Spirit of his grandfather’s father charged him with breaking the laws by rearing polybeasts. He could not deny it. So surely it was a Spirit that spoke, and spoke truth?”

Ezzard answered: “There is not a farmer in the land who has not been guilty of the same sin. Who is to tell how many horns a cow had when it is carcass meat? I was on safe ground in condemning him.”

“And my father—he told me he obeyed your orders because it was through you he heard my mother’s voice after she was dead. Was this a trick also?”

“In part, but he heard her voice. Through another machine of our ancestors. Words are trapped on something like a ribbon, which can be cut and put together again so that the words make a message that one chooses.”

A new and terrible thought came. “My mother’s death . . .”

Lanark shook his head. “That was not our doing. We cannot control everything as was shown by Jeremy’s capture of the city. We made use of it to help bind your father to us. But it was a blow all the same, a bitter blow. It turned your half brother against you. Because of that Ezzard had to flee with you and bring you here.”

“Your plan had failed already when Jeremy took the city.”

“Not failed. We could have worked on him. He would have let you be Prince in your father’s place, thinking you a boy and powerless.”

I said angrily: “Do you think I would have taken it from his bloody hands?”

“If Ezzard had shown you a hope of revenge at the end, you would. You are a good hater.”

I knew it was true. I said:

“But it was all for nothing. Peter has the city and I am here in exile. So you have failed after all.”

Lanark shook his head. “We have lost one battle, but there will be more. While you live you are still the Prince in Waiting.”

“An empty promise,” I said, “from Spirits that do not exist.”

“Not just that,” Lanark said. “A hope also, the hope of living men.”

• • •

In the weeks that followed I learned many things. About polymufs, for instance. The word came from an older one, meaning of many shapes. Such freaks of nature had increased after the Disaster and it was thought they were caused by strange radiations from the sun, probably the same which were believed to have reawakened the earth’s deep fires. Some, like the dwarfs, bred true, but most did not. In civilized lands men had done their best to extirpate all the freaks among animals, but mothers would not let their babies be killed. So they were allowed to live, the dwarfs as a race apart, the polymufs as servants to normal men. In the savage countries, beyond the Burning Lands, there was no control and misshapenness ran riot.

I learned about the Seers. This was not the only nor the most important Sanctuary. There was another in the ruins of the great-city which had been called London. They told me it had stretched over more than six hundred square miles and eight million people had lived in it: figures so great that one could not imagine the reality. The Seers had found a place, under the rubble, where the wisdom of the ancients was stored in books, and they quarried there for knowledge.

I learned something of that knowledge myself: not much, for my mind was not equipped to grasp it. My purpose, as they told me, was different: to help create the conditions in which knowledge could be brought from hiding and the cities made safe against the sea of barbarism which lapped all round and otherwise must rise and drown them.

And I saw the machines which could do things more marvelous than anything that had been supposed to be done by the Spirits. Machines for seeing and listening at a distance, machines that could propel a carriage ten times faster than a team of horses could pull it, machines that could detect metal under the earth, that could chill meat and keep its sweetness without salting throughout a summer, that could show strange beasts living inside the smallest drop of water . . . a score and more of wonders.

And one day burly Murphy showed me something called an induction furnace. He explained how it worked, through this power that was called electricity. He said:

“It case-hardens steel. You get a hard surface such as no ordinary forge could produce.”

I nodded, partly understanding him. He said:

“You left the jeweled sword you won at the Contest behind you, Luke. But do you remember that one day I promised you a sword of the Spirits? Even though there are no Spirits, you will have the sword: we shall make it here and I promise you no sword made by dwarfs will notch it. It will shatter anything that comes against it, if your right hand is strong enough.”

“When?” I asked. “When will you make the sword?”

“When it is time.”

“But how long will that be? I am tired of living underground, with no wind, no sunlight, no day or night except what we make ourselves.”

“We are all tired of it,” Murphy said, “but we must wait. There is a moment for striking: too soon or too late and we fail. And if we fail, all hope is gone. You must learn patience, Luke.”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder and I nodded unwilling assent. I itched to be on a horse riding through the meadows beneath St. Catherine’s Hill, to see the walls of Winchester looming high before me. But he was right, and impatience was at least more easily borne than despair. The time might be long delayed, but the time would come.