And that was when my head seemed to fall off upwards, and I sat down bump on the bridge.
‘I can’t move,’ I said. ‘I won’t move.’
Giddy and mindless, I thought fearfully of what Argul would do – scold me, pick me up, drag me, or just sit and hold my hand until I felt better.
How I wished he was there. I started to talk to him.
‘I’ll be all right in a minute, Argul.’
The slave stood over me, indifferent.
‘His hair,’ I said to the imagined Argul, ‘isn’t hair. It’s got leaves in it.’
My head cleared. I said to the slave quite sharply, ‘Why are there leaves in your hair, Grembilard?’
‘They grow in it,’ he said.
I felt sensible, nodded, and stood up. I was all right after that. I kept asking questions about his hair.
He answered them all, but we – I – got nowhere.
He says his hair is partly hair and partly leaves. Has to be washed and then watered, or something. It looks real. Couldn’t be.
But I was all right.
I started to notice the cliff, the Rise, when we were about an eighth of a mile off from it.
It truly is enormous, and it does look natural, most of it, but every so often there is a part that, close to, you can see is carved out – a balcony or a bulging upper storey, long ranks of windows, with glass or lattices. Steps too, appearing and angling round, and towers, these with roofs of tiles but they’re almost all faded, just a wink of indigo or lime here and there.
Masses of vines grow up the face of the rock-walls, and trees thrust out of them, as I’d seen from the other side.
Where the waterfall waterfell, all I could see was spray like smoke, with a glitter of sun like dancing coins. But the fall itself was about three miles away along the cliff to my left.
Where the bridge had come out wasn’t a hole, but a huge gatemouth.
We got nearer and I began to dread the gatemouth more than I’d dreaded the bridge.
But I couldn’t really stop to admire the view again, so I went on.
Some pink parrots flew over as we got there. Then we were simply off the bridge and standing on another terrace. Cut stairs led up into the dim cavern or hall or whatever.
If I go in, will I ever get out?
And then I thought, Oh, come on. I’ve got out of everything else!
So I marched behind leafy Grembilard, up these old sloping stairs, and into the Mouth of the Rise.
WHERE?
What I said to him, to Argul, all that time – only a month or so – ago, about how the ring he gave me felt like a part of my hand. It does, so much so that I forget I have it on half the time, and in the beginning I sometimes knocked it on things.
The stone (diamond) is part cut and part polished. It’s like a great tear.
I mention this now because it’s all I have left of Argul. And because of what the slave said, Grembilard, as we walked into the cavern.
‘Lady Claidi, I must ask, is that your mother’s ring?’
My mother. I hadn’t thought of her for a while. I mean, I’d never been sure what I was told about her was true – that she was called Twilight Star, was a princess, and so on. The story of my mother was one of the things that made me escape from the House with Nemian, and go to the City of the Wolf Tower. So it was told me, no doubt, to help make me do just that. On the other hand, I told Ironel Novendot the ring was my mother’s, so I could wear it openly in the Tower. Ironel was the only one I told.
‘Who told you that?’ I asked Grembilard.
But all I got was ‘The Prince –’ (and that name again) ‘may like to know if that is the ring of Twilight Star.’
‘Then he can have fun guessing, can’t he?’
But did all this really mean Ironel had sent word here, to this prince with a name of – what was it? – eleven syllables. Then that meant too she’d known I would be brought here?!
I looked round briskly. The cavern-hall was several storeys high, the ceiling rock carved with flowerlets and wiggles. The floor was old stone, polished with wear in places, and damp and going mossy.
Anyway, why did they want to know about the ring?
‘Why does he want to know about the ring?’
‘It has properties.’
‘Like what?’
But only slavey silence now, and I was (slavishly) following him on, up another staircase, which had carved marble animals either side, tigers with beards, and things like bears.
Didn’t matter did it, anyway? It wasn’t Twilight’s ring. If I was even her daughter.
A door opened to one side, straight off the stair. It opened I suppose by clockwork, since we didn’t touch it and no one else was there.
He went in. I went in. The door shut.
There were lots of corridors after that, some quite narrow and others wide. Carvings, tiles, and here and there water dripping down the wall.
All the corridors had windows, some very high up so only sky was visible. In one wide corridor was a line of ten windows, floor to ceiling, about two man-heights high. They were of rich stained glass in complicated patterns. I must have seen them when I was across the gulf, once they were lit up at night. From this side you couldn’t see through.
Sometimes there were closed doors, or other passages, arches, stairways.
I kept expecting to meet other people. There must be
