Hwel gave the apple to Tomjon, who accepted it gravely.
‘I reckon them witches did you a bad turn, missus,’ said the dwarf. ‘You know. Changelings and whatnot. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. My great-great-grandmother said it was done to us, once. The fairies swapped a human and a dwarf. We never realised until he started banging his head on things, they say—’
‘They say this fruit be like unto the world
So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man
So red without and yet within, unclue’d,
We find the worm, the rot, the flaw.
However glows his bloom the bite
Proves many a man be rotten at the core.’
The two of them swivelled around to stare at Tomjon, who nodded to them and proceeded to eat the apple.
‘That was the Worm speech from The Tyrant,’ whispered Hwel. His normal grasp of the language temporarily deserted him. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘But he sounded just like—’
‘I’m going to get Vitoller,’ said Hwel, and dropped off the tailboard and ran through the frozen puddles to the front of die convoy, where the actor-manager was whistling tunelessly and, yes, strolling.
‘What ho, b’zugda-hiara[8],’ he said cheerfully.
‘You’ve got to come at once! He’s talking!’
Talking?’
Hwel jumped up and down. ‘He’s quoting!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve got to come! He sounds just like—’
‘Me?’ said Vitoller, a few minutes later, after they had pulled the lattys into a grove of leafless trees by the roadside. ‘Do I sound like that?’
‘Yes,’ chorused the company.
Young Willikins, who specialised in female roles, prodded Tomjon gently as he stood on an upturned barrel in the middle of the clearing.
‘Here, boy, do you know my speech from Please Yourself!’ he said.
Tomjon nodded. ‘ “He is not dead, I say, who lies beneath the stone. For if Death could but hear—” ‘
They listened in awed silence as the endless mists rolled across the dripping fields and the red ball of the sun floated down the sky. When the boy had finished hot tears were streaming down Hwel’s face.
‘By all the gods,’ he said, when Tomjon had finished, ‘I must have been on damn good form when I wrote that.’ He blew his nose noisily.
‘Do I sound like that?’ said Willikins, his face pale.
Vitoller patted him gently on the shoulder.
‘If you sounded like that, my bonny,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be standing arse-deep in slush in the middle of these forsaken fields, with nothing but liberated cabbage for thy tea.’
He clapped his hands.
‘No more, no more,’ he said, his breath making puffs of steam in the freezing air. ‘Backs to it, everybody. We must be outside the walls of Sto Lat by sunset.’
As the grumbling actors awoke from the spell and wandered back to the shafts of the lattys Vitoller beckoned to the dwarf and put his arm around his shoulders, or rather around the top of his head.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘You people know all about magic, or so it is said. What do you make of it?’
‘He spends all his time around the stage, master. It’s only natural that he should pick things up,’ said Hwel vaguely.
Vitoller leaned down.
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I believe I heard a voice that took my doggerel and shaped it and fired it back through my ears and straight into my heart,’ said Hwel simply. ‘I believe I heard a voice that got behind the crude shape of the words and said the things I had meant them to say, but had not the skill to achieve. Who knows where such things come from?’
He stared impassively into Vitoller’s red face. ‘He may have inherited it from his father,’ he said.
‘But-‘
‘And who knows what witches may achieve?’ said the dwarf.
Vitoller felt his wife’s hand pushed into his. As he stood up, bewildered and angry, she kissed him on the back of the neck.
‘Don’t torture yourself,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it all for the best? Your son has declaimed his first word.’
Spring came, and ex-King Verence still wasn’t taking being dead lying down. He prowled the castle relentlessly, seeking for a way in which its ancient stones would release their grip on him.
He was also trying to keep out of the way of the other ghosts.
Champot was all right, if a bit tiresome. But Verence had backed away at the first sight of the Twins, toddling hand in hand along the midnight corridors, their tiny ghosts a memorial to a deed darker even than the usual run of regicidal unpleasantness.
And then there was the Troglodyte Wanderer, a rather faded monkeyman in a furry loincloth who apparently happened to haunt the castle merely because it had been built on his burial mound. For no obvious reason a chariot with a screaming woman in it occasionally rumbled through the laundry room. As for the kitchen . . .
One day he’d given in, despite everything old Champot had said, and had followed the smells of cooking into the big, hot, high domed cavern that served the castle as kitchen and abattoir. Funny thing, that. He’d never been down there since his childhood. Somehow kings and kitchens didn’t go well together.
It was full of ghosts.
But they weren’t human. They weren’t even proto-human.
They were stags. They were bullocks. They were rabbits, and pheasants, and partridges, and sheep, and pigs. There were even some round blobby things that looked unpleasantly like the ghosts of oysters. They were packed so tightly that in fact they merged and mingled, turning the kitchen into a silent, jostling nightmare of teeth and fur and horns, half-seen and misty. Several noticed him, and there was a weird blarting of noises that sounded far-off, tinny and unpleasantly out of register. Through them all the cook and his assistants wandered quite unconcernedly, making vegetarian sausages.
Verence had stared for half a minute and then fled, wishing that he still had a real stomach so that he could stick his fingers down his throat for forty years and bring up everything he’d eaten.
He’d sought solace in the stables, where his beloved hunting dogs had whined and scratched at the door and had generally been very ill-at-ease at his sensed but unseen presence.
Now he haunted – and how he hated the word – the Long Gallery, where paintings of long-dead kings looked down at him from the dusty shadows. He would have felt a lot more kindly towards them if he hadn’t met a number of them gibbering in various parts of the premises.
Verence had decided that he had two aims in death. One was to get out of the castle and find his son, and the other was to get his revenge on the duke. But not by killing him, he’d decided, even if he could find a way, because an eternity in that giggling idiot’s company would lend a new terror to death.
He sat under a painting of Queen Bemery (670-722), whose rather stern good looks he would have felt a whole lot happier about if he hadn’t seen her earlier that morning walking through the wall.
Verence tried to avoid walking through walls. A man had his dignity.
He became aware that he was being watched.
He turned his head.
There was a cat sitting in the doorway, subjecting him to a slow blink. It was a mottled grey and extremely fat . . .
No. It was extremely big. It was covered with so much scar tissue that it looked like a fist with fur on it. Its ears were a couple of perforated stubs, its eyes two yellow slits of easygoing malevolence, its tail a twitching series of question marks as it stared at him.
Greebo had heard that Lady Felmet had a small white female cat and had strolled up to pay his respects.
Verence had never seen an animal with so much built-in villainy. He didn’t resist as it waddled across the floor and tried to rub itself against his legs, purring like a waterfall.
‘Well, well,’ said the king, vaguely. He reached down and made an effort to scratch it behind the two ragged bits on top of its head. It was a relief to find someone else besides another ghost who could see him, and Greebo, he couldn’t help feeling, was a distinctly unusual cat. Most of the castle cats were either pampered pets or flat-eared kitchen and stable habitue’s who generally resembled the very rodents they lived on. This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures. Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox.
Only one type of person kept a cat like this.