Part 12 (2/2)

He'd done his best. Vitoller had left the education of Tomjon in his hands; ”You're better at all that business,” he'd said, adding with his usual tact, ”Besides, you're more his height.”

But it wasn't working.

”Apple,” he repeated, waving the fruit in the air.

Tomjon grinned at him. He was nearly three years old, and hadn't said a word anyone could understand. Hwel was harboring dark suspicions about the witches.

”But he seems bright enough,” said Mrs. Vitoller, who was traveling inside the latty and darning the chain mail. ”He knows what things are. He does what he's told. I just wish you'd speak,” she said softly, patting the boy on the cheek.

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 realized until he started banging his head on things, they say-”

”They say this fruit be like unto the worldSo sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of manSo red without and yet within, unclue'd,We find the worm, the rot, the flaw.However glows his bloom the biteProves many a man be rotten at the core.”

The two of them swiveled around to stare at Tomjon, who nodded to them and proceeded to eat the apple.

”That was the Worm speech from The Tyrant The Tyrant,” whispered Hwel. His normal grasp of the language temporarily deserted him. ”b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,” 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 the convoy, where the actor-manager was whistling tunelessly and, yes, strolling.

”What ho, b'zugda-hiara b'zugda-hiara,”* he said cheerfully. he said cheerfully.

”You've got to come at once! He's talking!”

”Talking?”

Hwel jumped up and down. ”He's quoting 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 specialized 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 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 G.o.ds,” he said, when Tomjon had finished, ”I must have been on d.a.m.n 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 a.r.s.e-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 impa.s.sively 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 full of ghosts. of ghosts.

But they weren't human. They weren't even protohuman.

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 a.s.sistants wandered quite unconcernedly, making vegetarian sausages.

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