The Book of Lost Things(62)

“I can’t take this,” said Roland. “You will all have need of it.”

“With the Beast dead, the animals will return, and we will have prey to hunt once again.”

Roland thanked him and prepared to turn Scylla to the east.

“You are a brave young man,” Fletcher said to David. “I wish there was something more that I could give to you, but all I could find was this.”

In his hand he held what looked like a blackened hook. He gave it to David. It was heavy, and had the texture of bone.

“It is one of the Beast’s claws,” said Fletcher. “If anyone ever questions your bravery, or you feel your courage ebb, take it in your hand and remember what you did here.”

David thanked him and stored the claw in his pack. Then Roland spurred Scylla on, and they left the ruins of the village behind them.

*

They rode in silence through the twilight world, its appearance rendered more spectral yet by the fallen snow. Everything seemed to glow with a bluish tinge, and the land appeared both brighter and yet more alien. It was very cold, and their breath hung heavily in the air. David felt the little hairs in his nostrils freeze, and the moisture from his breath formed crystals of ice upon his eyelashes. Roland rode slowly, taking care to keep Scylla away from ditches and drifts for fear that she might injure herself.

“Roland,” said David at last. “There’s something that’s been bothering me. You told me that you were just a soldier, but I don’t think that’s true.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Roland.

“I saw how you gave orders to the villagers and how they obeyed you, even the ones who weren’t sure they liked you. I have seen your armor and your sword. I thought that the decoration on them was just bronze or colored metal, but when I looked more closely, I could see that it was gold. The sun symbol on your breastplate and your shield is made of gold, and there is gold on your scabbard and on the hilt of your sword. How can that be, if you are just a soldier?”

Roland did not answer for a time, then he said, “I was once more than a soldier. My father was lord of a vast estate, and I was his eldest son and heir. But he did not approve of me or of the way that I lived my life. We argued, and in a fit of anger he banished me from his presence and from his lands. It was not long after our fight that my quest for Raphael began.”

David wanted to ask more, but he sensed that whatever lay between Roland and Raphael was private and very personal. To pursue it further would have been rude, and would have been hurtful to Roland.

“And you?” asked Roland. “Tell me more about yourself and your home.”

And David did. He tried to explain some of the wonders of his own world to Roland. He told him of airplanes and radio, of cinemas and cars. He spoke of the war, of the conquest of nations and the bombing of cities. If Roland thought these things were extraordinary, he did not show it. He listened to them the way an adult might listen to a child’s constructed tales, impressed that a mind could create such fantasies but reluctant to share their creator’s belief in them. He seemed more interested in what the Woodsman had told David of the king, and of the book that held his secrets.

“I too have heard that the king knows a great deal about books and stories,” said Roland. “His realm may be falling to pieces around him, but he always has time for talk of tales. Perhaps the Woodsman was right to try to lead you toward him.”

“If the king is weak, as you say, then what will happen to his kingdom when he dies?” asked David. “Does he have a son or a daughter who will succeed him?”

“The king has no children,” said Roland. “He has ruled for a very long time, since before I was born, but he has never taken a wife.”

“And before him?” asked David, who had always been interested in kings and queens and kingdoms and knights. “Was his father king?”

Roland struggled to remember.

“There was a queen before him, I think. She was very, very old, and she announced that a young man, one whom nobody had ever seen before but who was soon to come, would rule the realm in her place. That was what happened, according to those who were alive then. Within days of the young man’s arrival, he was king, and the queen went to her bed and fell asleep and never woke again. They say that she seemed almost… grateful to die.”

They came to a stream, frozen over by the plummeting temperature, and there they decided to rest for a short while. Roland used the hilt of his sword to break the ice so that Scylla could drink from the water beneath. David wandered along the edge of the stream while Roland ate. He was not hungry. Fletcher’s wife had given him great slabs of homemade bread and jam for breakfast that morning, and they were still sitting in his stomach. He sat on a rock and dug in the snow for stones to throw upon the ice. The snow was deep, and soon his arm was buried in it. His fingers touched some pebbles—

And a hand shot out of the snow beside him and gripped him just above the elbow. It was white and thin, with long, jagged nails, and with enormous force it pulled him from the rock and into the snow. David opened his mouth to yell for help, but a second hand appeared and clamped itself across his lips. He was dragged beneath the drift, the snow falling on top of him so that he could no longer see the trees and sky above, the hands never loosening their hold upon him. He felt hard ground at his back and was overcome by a terrible sense of suffocation, and then the earth too collapsed and he found himself in a hollow of dirt and stone. The hands released him, and a light shone through the darkness. Tree roots hung down from above, gently caressing his face, and David saw the openings of three tunnels, their mouths converging on this one spot. Yellowing bones lay in one corner, the flesh that once covered them long since rotted or consumed. There were worms and beetles and spiders all around, scurrying and fighting and dying in the moist, cold earth.