The Fire Dragon. Katharine Kerr

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      Oggyn set his lips together hard and stared for a moment more.

      ‘Ah well,’ Oggyn said at last. ‘None of my affair, anyway. Shall we go up?’

      ‘By all means. We should find the prince and his brother there before us.’

      ‘I shan’t be able to climb around like this much longer.’ Bellyra laid both hands on her swollen belly. ‘But I couldn’t stand not knowing. I wonder if there truly is a secret passage. Tell me, Maddo. Doesn’t that mark look like it means a doorway of some kind?’

      Maddyn held the fragment of mouldy parchment up to an arrow slit for the sunlight. They were standing in a wedge-shaped chamber part way up one of the half-brochs, which joined the central tower like petals round the centre of a daisy. According to the piece of map, this chamber should have had two doors, the one by which they’d entered and another directly across. Yet the inward bulge of the stone wall opposite showed nothing.

      ‘It does,’ Maddyn said at last. ‘Perhaps the door’s been walled up.’

      The princess’s pages, however, gave up less easily. The two boys began poking at the mortar and pushing rather randomly on the stones. All at once the wall groaned, or so it sounded, a long sigh of pain. The boys yelped and jumped back.

      ‘So!’ Bellyra said. ‘I’ll wager we have a spy’s hole or suchlike here. The royal council chamber, the one on the second floor of the main broch, should be right near here.’

      The pages set to again. Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, they were Gwerbret Ammerwdd’s sons, and apparently they had inherited that great lord’s stubbornness. They pushed, prodded, laid their backs against the wall and shoved until, all at once, a section of wall swung inward with an alarming collection of squeaks, groans, and rumbles.

      ‘Look, Your Highness!’ said Vertyc, the elder of the pair. ‘Here’s the door!’

      ‘Not a very secret one, I must say, with a noise like that.’ Bellyra took a few steps forward to peer through the opening. ‘It wants oiling, most like.’

      Maddyn joined her and peered through the opening.

      ‘It’s more a passageway than a room inside,’ Maddyn said.

      ‘It might lead to the council chamber. I wonder if the kings had this made to eavesdrop on their councillors. There was a hidden chamber like this in Dun Cerrmor. By the end my father didn’t trust anyone, and so he had one built.’

      ‘Shall we find out?’ Maddyn said.

      ‘By all means!’ Bellyra gestured at the pages. ‘You two stay out here. If that door swings shut, we could be trapped. Don’t look so disappointed! You can explore it once we come out again, and we’ll watch the door for you.’

      The narrow passage smelled heavily of mice. Some twenty feet along they heard voices: Nevyn and Councillor Oggyn. Grinning, Bellyra held a finger to her lips. When they stopped to listen, the sound came clearly.

      ‘The spring’s upon us,’ Oggyn was saying. ‘We need to requisition mules and suchlike.’

      ‘I’ve no idea how many we’ll need,’ Nevyn said. ‘It depends upon the muster.’

      Bellyra could just make out Maryn’s voice. Apparently he was sitting at some distance from the wall. As the two councillors continued talking about provisions and transport, Bellyra felt on the edge of tears. The army would ride out soon, leaving her and the other women behind with only the familiar summer terrors for company.

      When she glanced at Maddyn, she found him leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. It never ceased to amaze her how fighting men would sleep whenever they could, no matter how precarious their balance. Grey streaked Maddyn’s dark curly hair, and he was weather-beaten and gaunt from his soldier’s life, but it was his kindness that had snared her. This summer she would worry doubly, she realized, both for her husband and for the man upon whose devotion she had come to rely when dark moods overtook her. For a moment she found herself tempted to kiss him awake. The feeling brought a cold panic with it. As the queen of all Deverry, she would have to keep her honour as pure as a priest of Bel. She took a sharp step back, kicked a rattling stone, and woke him.

      ‘It’s stuffy in here,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s leave.’

      Out in the cleaner air of the chamber Maddyn took a few deep breaths and rubbed his eyes. Bellyra sent the boys in for their look around, then watched him while he studied the fragment of map.

      ‘Truly interesting,’ Maddyn said at last. ‘So kings eavesdrop like commoners, do they?’

      ‘It looks as if the ones here did. The next time Maryn holds a full council I’ll remember this. I always wonder what he’s like when there are no women around. He must be quite different.’

      ‘One would hope.’

      Bellyra laughed, and not very decorously, either. There was a time when that jest would have wounded her to the heart, she realized. Maddyn grinned at her.

      ‘Now the real question,’ she went on, ‘is when this passage was built. I’ve not found a thing about it in the records, which makes sense, of course. They could hardly keep it secret if they talked about it. But then, I wonder who did the building?’

      ‘Perhaps the king had them slain afterwards.’

      ‘Ych! I hope not. Although –’ Bellyra paused, thinking. ‘Nevyn has an ancient book called TALES OF THE DAWNTIME. According to that, the earliest brochs in Deverry weren’t built with proper floors and chambers and suchlike. They had double walls, with a good-sized space between them, you see, and they were empty like a chimney in the centre, because there would only be one big fire at the bottom to keep everyone warm. And in those double walls were little rooms and some sort of corridor called galleries.’

      ‘I see. This passage could be a remnant of a gallery, then. The heart of Dun Deverry’s very old, after all.’

      ‘Just so, and then the only thing the later king would have had to add would have been this door. And he might have been able to have that made secretly, if he paid the mason enough.’

      ‘True-spoken. And especially if the mason were as close-mouthed as Otho, say.’

      ‘Quite so. I wonder if our pages have had enough exploring in there? I hate to admit this, Maddo, but I’m tired and I want to sit down.’

      Maddyn called to the boys, and in a few moments they hurried out. Cobwebs glistened in their hair.

      ‘There’s a little staircase at the end, your highness,’ Vertyc said. ‘But it doesn’t go up to anything.’

      ‘Unless it’s a false floor,’ his brother, Tanno, joined in, ‘but it would make ever so much noise to find out.’

      ‘We’d best wait till the prince’s council isn’t in session, then,’ Bellyra said. ‘But don’t worry, we’ll come back to look at it.’

      They all hurried down the staircase and outside to find the sunlight leaving them. From the south, white clouds were gliding in, billowing up into the sky with the promise of a storm. Servants trotted back and forth, fetching firewood СКАЧАТЬ