Unicorn Ring - Here There Be Dragonnes Part 58

"I wish to-to see the lady of the house," I said, conscious that a name would have been better, but of course names meant nothing to a bird. "About a pigeon. This one," and I touched Traveler with my finger. "I believe he is one of hers. He has a message to deliver."

The porter stared out at us, at our travel-stained clothes, our generally tatty appearance, and I didn't blame him for his next remark.

"My mistress don't entertain rogues and vagabonds. Why, you don't even know her name, do you? Besides, how do I know it ain't all a trick to get in and rob us all? Could be anyone's pigeon you got."

"This color?" and I stroked Traveler's wing. "Pink pigeons don't come in dozens. Besides, only your mistress has the key to the message strapped to his leg. . . ."

He thought about it. Finally: "I'll go and see," and he shut the gate again.

We waited for what seemed an age. I urged Traveler to fly over the gate and find his mistress, but he refused.

"We go in together," he said firmly.

Once more the shuffling steps approached the gate, but this time one half was flung open. "Mistress Rowena is in the garden at the back. Leave the beasts here." I took Gill's hand and followed the way that was pointed out to me, across the cobbles and down a narrow alleyway at the side of the house to a garden full of sun and sleepy afternoon scents.

Square beds were planted centrally with bay or evergreen, fancifully trimmed, and edged with box or rosemary. In the beds themselves were the long runners and green tips of miniature strawberries, the soft faces of violet and pansy, the tight buds of clove carnations. Beside each bed ran a little ca.n.a.l of water, probably fed from the river I could see glinting at the foot of the garden, beyond a lawn starred with daisies, camomile and b.u.t.tercups.

Against one wall were trellises for the climbing roses, on the other were tall clumps of dark Bear's Braies and pale fennel, and behind was a thick hedge of oleander.

At the top end of the garden fat, lazy carp swam in a pond plated with water- lily pads and there, tossing pinches of manchet into their hungry mouths, was Traveler's owner, who turned to meet us with a smile. She was as the bird had described: small, slim, with icy blond hair hanging straight down her back with a blue and gold fillet binding her brow, to match her deep-sleeved dress.

Her face was pale, as were her lashes, brows and blue eyes.

Her smile revealed white teeth as small as a child's, with tiny points. A cat's smile, I thought. She held out her hands and reached for Traveler, fluttering nervously on my shoulder, and pinioned him in her soft white hands.

"My servant, Pauncefoot, told me you had found one of my birds, but I never expected it to be my Beauty! Where did you find him?" and she put her cheek against his head, crooning softly.

I started to explain how I had rescued him, about the broken wing and how long it had taken to heal, but as soon as I mentioned the message on his leg I could see the rest didn't matter. Still nursing the bird she fumbled in her purse pocket and drew out a tiny key, as fine as a needle and in a moment the leg ring was open and she was unrolling a thin strip of paper between finger and thumb. For the first time I saw a tinge of color in her cheeks as she read the few words it contained. She looked at us, smiling that cat smile.

"He comes at the end of this month, as he promised. . . ." Her eyes were dreamy. "I knew he could not stay away. He was my father's apprentice.

When he asked for my hand, my father stipulated that we spend a year apart and he sent Lorenzo north on business, with the added proviso that we should not communicate with each other. He still thinks Lorenzo is after my money. .

. ." She cuddled Traveler closer. "I thought of a scheme to circ.u.mvent my father's dictum. Lorenzo took two of my pigeons with him: a grey, and Beauty here. The grey arrived back in October confirming his love, and he must have sent Beauty soon after. My father will know nothing of the message. He had bribed the servants to intercept any letters, but he never thought of the pigeons." She turned to me. "I cannot thank you enough: with my father ill I cannot ask you to stay overnight, but perhaps with these-" She handed me some coins, one gold, I noticed "-I can combine my thanks with a.s.surance you may find good lodgings."

At first I was shy of accepting, but looking at the well-cared-for garden, her clothes, the tall house behind, I realized she could well afford it. "Thank you .

. . The pigeon: his wing has healed, but he may not be able to manage such long flights as before. You will . . . ?"

"Still care for him?" she supplied. "Of course. Somehow he guided you here with my message-I can always breed from him. I have a couple of females the same shade. . . ."

I turned to go but suddenly Traveler-I couldn't think of him as "Beauty"- flew from her arms onto my shoulder. I turned my head to see his ruby eyes regarding me steadily. "Thanks," he crooned. "I shall always remember you, all of you. . . ." And he leaned forward and pretend-fed me, as an adult pigeon would a squab, then sprang from my shoulder and flew to the pigeon loft against the house wall.

I heard his owner draw her breath in sharply as she watched his flight, but my eyes were suddenly too blurred to see the expression on her face. She called out peremptorily to a gardener's boy raking the gravel between the flower beds. "Shut the loft door! Hurry . . ."

Out in the street again, the doors shut behind us, the coins jingling satisfactorily in my pocket, I should have felt satisfaction at a task well completed, a wanderer having found his home, but I didn't. I felt uneasy, depressed, somehow all wrong. I opened my mouth to say something and the ring on my finger, dormant so long, gave me such a sudden painful jolt that I cried out instead. At the same time a voice full of terror rang in my mind: "Help me! Help me. . . ." It was Traveler. What in the world had gone wrong?

Obeying an instinct stronger than thought or caution I turned and began to beat on the closed gate: "Let me in!" but there was no answer, and all the while I could sense the feather-flutter of Traveler's fear in my mind. I threw myself against the gate, but it wouldn't yield; by now the others, with the exception of course of Gill, had also "heard" the pigeon's panic. They needed no urging to help my a.s.sault on the gate. Growch barked hysterically, setting off other dogs down the road, the Wimperling added a shoulder-charge to my efforts and Basher even battered his head against his basket, but it was Mistral who got us in.

Turning, she aimed two vicious kicks at the gate panels, which gave on the second blow, allowing me to reach in and slip the bolts. As I reached the garden again at a run, I saw the gardener's boy hand a feebly fluttering bird to his mistress. Grabbing his wings cruelly with one hand she put the other hand around his neck, the tendons on her wrist already tightened to twist his head off. "Stop!" I cried. "In the name of G.o.d, stop!"

Chapter Twenty.One.

She paused, her fingers still cruelly tight on Traveler's wings and neck. "Get out! What business is it of yours?"

"But you promised. . . ." I was bewildered. "You said you would care for him. .

. . I don't understand!"

"It doesn't matter whether you understand or not!" she hissed. "It is my bird, to do with as I will! If I wish to wring the wretched thing's neck because it has betrayed me-"

"Betrayed you? How?"

She showed her small, pointed teeth in a grimace. "He is my bird, he does as I say, he owes me all his devotion! I saw what he did to you: he has never done that to me!"

She was jealous! Jealous of an affectionate gesture the poor bird had given me. . . . She must be mad. Feeling in my pocket I tossed her coins to the ground in front of her.

"Take your money: I don't want it! Instead, I'll take back a bird you obviously don't want either."

White lids came down over pale blue eyes, but not before I had seen the sudden gleam of cunning, so quickly veiled. "Very well," she said slowly, but her fingers were almost imperceptibly tightening round the bird's neck. At the same moment the ring on my finger gave me another sharp shock and my hand jerked forward, the ring now pointing at the Lady Rowena.

She screamed as though she had been stung and dropped Traveler, who lay at her feet, fluttering feebly, scrabbling round in the dirt in helpless circles. I picked him up gently and held him close. "It's all right now. . . ."

His owner backed away from me, crossing herself, her eyes wide with an emotion I couldn't fathom. "Witch! What have you done?" I moved towards her and she crossed herself again: I realized now the emotion she felt was fear. "All right, all right, take him! I wouldn't have kept him anyway: there is a knot in his wing, and I never keep anything that isn't perfect. . . ." And she spat at me, the phlegm landing in a yellow gobbet at my feet. "Now get out, before I call the servants to have you thrown out, or summon the soldiery and have you all arrested for theft and witchcraft!"

We went.

When I told Gill what had happened he actually put out a finger and stroked the still-trembling bird. "Poor little thing," he said. It was the first time I had seen him ever evince any interest in any of the animals: his usual stance was indifference. "What will you do with him now?"

"The first thing to do," said the Wimperling, "is to get out of this town right now, before she pulls herself together and does get us all thrown into jail. A woman like that cannot bear to be bested."

We took the southern gate from the city, not stopping even to eat. A trembling Traveler sat on my shoulder, looking back at the towers and pinnacles from which he had hoped so much, now bathed in the magical light of a yellow- orange sunset. I smoothed his feathers.

"Don't worry," I said. "We'll find you somewhere better. . . ."

"But that was my home," he said with sad, una.s.sailable logic.

The Wimperling looked up. "A home is not one place," he said slowly. "A home can be a place where you are born and brought up, a place you like better than any other; it can be a dwelling where your loved one lives, a house in which your children are raised, or somewhere you have to live because there is no other. A home is made by you, it does not create itself. It can be large or small, beautiful or ugly, grand or mean. But in the end it is only one thing: the place where your heart is. And you don't have to be there in your bodily self; you can carry it with you in spirit wherever you go. . . . Like love,"

he added.

I thought about what he had said later that night when we had found a farmhouse and paid a couple of coins for well-water and a share of the undercroft with their other animals-goats and chickens. What did "home"

mean to the bird, the tortoise, the horse, the knight? For them it was where they were born, where their own kind lived, simple as that. Growch and I were on the lookout for comfort and security, in my case a husband, and in his case I suspected he would settle wherever I did-and wherever it was, and with whom, there we would call "home."

But what about the Wimperling? He was the philosopher, but he had never indicated where he wanted to go, where his heart lay. Born from an egg (if his memory was to be believed), raised as the runt of a litter of piglets and sold into a life of performing slavery-where did he want to go? South, he had said, but I believed he had no clear direction. I must ask him. If he went on growing at his present rate he would have to go and live with the h.e.l.lephunts, which I understood were as big as houses, or live by himself in a cave, for no sty would hold him.

We traveled south and west for six days and the terrain grew gradually wilder; the roads more tortuous. Now the hills were of limestone, striped by tumbling streams fed by the snow water that still lingered on the high peaks.

Pockets of reddish earth were starred with the scalding yellow of gorse and broom, pink-plumed spears of valerian and blossom from wild cherry. The pines and fir were showing a new, tender green at their tips, and the air was full of the scribble-song of siskins; orioles swung above our heads, gold and blue; flycatchers, wagtails and bee-eaters chittered and bobbed ahead of us on the road, and from far away I could hear the strange call of the hoopoe. Bees droned on the bushes, all on the same soporific note, ants marched in lines across our path, wasps were after anything we ate and the dusk was full of the piping of pipistrelles-the airy-mouses of legend.

And above and beyond all this there was a teasing, ephemeral scent that came and went with the southern breeze: a smell that could have been wet rocks, a drying lake, salted fish, dried blood but was none of these.

"It is the ocean," said Traveler, soaring high above us.

"It's the Great Water," said Basher, now stuffing himself from dawn to dusk with heather shoots, clover and young gra.s.s till his scales shone and his voice no longer was drawn out, thin and feeble.

"It's the sea," said Mistral, her pink nostrils flaring as she snuffed the wind.

"But not my sea. This is a little sea; mine is endless and comes cras.h.i.+ng in from the far corners of the world and the foam is like the manes of my people as they outrun the waves. . . ."

"Can you see this Great Water from your home?" I asked Basher curiously.

"It is a glint in the sun, far, far away, but you can taste it in the breeze and the salt sometimes touches the air like seasoning." He scurried away among the undergrowth, his long black claws clicking on the stones. "Thirsty-making . .

Southward still we went, leaving the great snow-tipped mountains behind.

The land was gentler, there were farms, orchards, tilled fields, small towns.

The midday sun burned Gill's and my faces, arms and legs and we shed clothes till he only wore a pair of shortened braies and an open s.h.i.+rt, and I kilted my skirt between my legs, glad that he could not see my bare legs.

One night, when sudden warm rain and a gusting wind that chased up and down like a boisterous child made us seek shelter, we found a ruined chapel on a little hill. Once there had been a settlement of houses nearby, but these were deserted and had fallen into disrepair, like the chapel. There was no clue as to what had happened to the previous inhabitants, but beneath the chapel walls were more than the usual number of untended graves. Perhaps one of the sudden pestilences had decimated the villagers and they had abandoned their homes; perhaps marauders had carried off the women and children: who knows?

It was near dusk when we sought shelter under the crumbling tower of the chapel, and I found enough broken sticks of furniture in the deserted houses to build a good blaze. There were no church vessels to be seen, nor any crosses, and the once-colorful murals had faded to blisters of pale brown and yellow-an arm, a leg, part of a flowing robe-so the place had obviously been de-consecrated, and I had no hesitation in building a fire to cook our strips of dried meat and vegetables.

The smoke rose upwards and then wavered as the gusts of wind from the round-arched windows caught it and blew it like a rag. Soon enough the pot was bubbling and the seductive smell of herby stew set my-and Growch's- stomach rumbling. I pulled the pot to one side and lidded it, to simmer till the ingredients were softer, and set about cutting up the two-day-old bread to warm through.

Suddenly there was a wild flutter and commotion above our heads and debris showered down amongst us. I was glad the lid was on the pot: I didn't fancy stewed pigeon s.h.i.+t.

"What in the world . . . ?"

Traveler took wing and circled our heads. "I'll go and see. . . ."

He was gone some time, and there were more flutterings, sc.r.a.pings and dried excreta, which luckily burned well. The noise subsided, there were a couple of coos and soft hoots and he rejoined us, feathers ruffled and disheveled, but he looked brighter, less despairful, than he had since we left his hometown.

"There are couple of dozen of my kind up there-wild ones, with little civility, but they are thriving. They have been in the tower since any can remember, and manage well enough foraging off the land. I have promised we will douse the fire as soon as possible, for the smoke is choking the young squabs who cannot leave their nests. I shall talk to them again in the morning."

With the morning came the sun again, and I built a fire in the open for oatmeal porridge and cheese and toasted bread. At dawn Traveler had disappeared up into the chapel tower again, and I saw him perched on a ledge with some of the other grey pigeons, or flying around the tower in formation, his pinky-brown color the only dissonance in the otherwise perfect unison of their wheeling and turning.

I scrubbed out the cooking pot with gra.s.s and sand from the nearby stream, filled the water bottle, packed everything up, washed my hands, feet and face, and helped Gill to do the same, but Traveler still did not reappear. I went into the chapel again and called him, and eventually he came fluttering down to land on my shoulder, his feathers a little disarranged.

"Time to go," I said, stroking the soft feathers on his neck and scratching him under his chin. He shuffled about on my shoulder.

"Do you mind . . . Do you mind if I stay?"

I looked up at the tower above; little heads peeped down, there was a ruffling of neck feathers, a warning "hoof!" , a croon or two, the pleading cheep of a squab. "Are you sure? They don't look very friendly to me."

"They know I am different: it will take time. But there are more hens than c.o.c.ks and rats got at the eggs last year. The ropes the rodents used to climb with have rotted and gone, but the flock needs building up. I think it will be all right. . . ." He sighed. "I hope so."

"But you don't know how to forage the countryside as they do," I objected.

"You will go hungry."

He straightened up and preened himself. "Then I shall just have to learn, won't I? I have all the summer to learn, and by winter I will be no different from the others."

"This wasn't what I meant for you. . . ."

"I know that, but you cannot decide my life for me: only I have the right to do that, now that you have freed me. Do not worry, I shall be fine. It is better that I take this chance while I can for I may not find a better. Living is better than not-living, whatever it brings. . . ."

"Good-bye," I said and kissed the top of his head. He sprang away and flew up to the rafters.

We had not gone far down the road, however, when there was a rush of wings and he was circling above us. "May you all find what you seek. Remember me!" And he was gone, leaving me feeling as empty as though I had had no breakfast.

"We have a dovecote at home," said Gill unexpectedly. "Their cooing was the first thing I used to hear when . . ." He trailed off. "I don't remember any more."

But at least he was recalling more and more; inconsequential little fragments maybe, but one day they might all fit together like a tapestry. And if I was missing the pigeon so much, what would it be like when my beloved knight finally found his home?

It was about a week later that we came to a place on the road where the land sloped sharply down to the south and there, a glittering s.h.i.+eld that stretched away as far as the eye could see, was Basher's Great Water. I sniffed the air and there it was again, that tantalizing salt smell that was like no other, even mixed as it was with pine, heather, wild garlic and gorse. I started to point it out to Gill, before I remembered he couldn't see.

Mistral was also snuffing the air, as was Growch, and Basher stopped chewing the chicory leaves I had put for him in his basket.

"It's here," he said. "Here, or hereabouts. We've found it. . . ."

"You're sure this is the place?"

"Smells right. There should be land sloping to the sea, way off in the distance.

Lots of heather, sandy soil for the eggs and hibernation. Pools or a stream, trees for shade. Rocks to keep the claws strong. No people. Lots of lady tortoises."

"From what I can see-"

"Oh, let meee doooown," he said impatiently. "Let meee see . . ."

Holding him to my chest, I scrambled down the steep slope to level ground, Growch beside me. I stood and looked about me for Basher's specifications.

The sea was about three miles distant and there was no sign of human habitation. The soil was sandyish, rocky, there was the sound of a stream off to the right and there were both pines and heather in abundance. Gorse, broom, wild garlic, oleander, fan palms, Creeping Jesus, the huge leaves of asphodel, thyme and rosemary-"Looks all right," I said cautiously. "But I can't see any other tortoises."

"I can!" helped Growch, who had christened every bush in sight and was now foraging farther down. "There's more movin' rocks down here: 'ow the 'ell do you tell if'n they're male or female? Looks all the effin' same to me. . . ."